OrangeTrail - Work out loud and cut back on meetings

By working out loud in Microsoft Teams, and adopting some basic housekeeping guidelines, management consulting company OrangeTrail is saving hundreds of hours on unnecessary meetings and ensuring when meetings are held, they result in measurable productivity, brainstorming and deliverables.

Perhaps the biggest mistake OrangeTrail sees when working with clients is the time wasted in meetings, with little outcome from the talkfests, when work could have been achieved in a threaded conversation in a Teams channels.

Jaap Linssen, founding partner at OrangeTrail, said while Microsoft Teams adoption has been heralded as a great success, most people are using it only for calls, meetings and chat.

Jaap Linssen, Founding Partner, OrangeTrail.

“Besides that, they’re just doing the same stuff they were doing 15 years ago,” he said.

At OrangeTrail, they are “extremists” in working out loud, Jaap says.

Every deliverable, every piece of work with a client, is recorded in a thread on Microsoft Teams.

The data from SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report confirms OrangeTrail is a world leader in Teams usage. From SWOOP’s benchmarking of almost 100,000 teams on Microsoft Teams, OrangeTrail boasted four teams in top 200, based on productivity and responsiveness measures.

As it happens, these four top performing teams were teams established for the four main projects OrangeTrail was working on during SWOOP’s analysis period from December 2020 to February 2021. Jaap is confident that during whatever period the analysis was carried out, the projects OrangeTrail was working on at the time would be among the top teams.

A simple formula for success

OrangeTrail follows a simple formula for success in Microsoft Teams.

When a new project begins, a team is created within Microsoft Teams. Alongside this may be an external team to invite the client in to work directly with them in the team and allow them access to files and updates.

Once the team is established, channels are created for all work streams in the project. Each channel has its own deliverables to work on.

Work is done in threaded discussion. Jaap says it’s very important to start a thread with a topic and then a brief description.

If it’s a document being worked on, like the PowerPoint presentation in the example above, that document is shared in the threaded discussion in the Teams channel.

Then it’s important to @mention colleagues to direct them on the work they need to address.

An example of what a team on Teams looks like at OrangeTrail.

“People get tasks and get jobs in the thread and get notifications to do so,” Jaap said.

“Everybody works on this document. Everybody basically talks about what they have done in the discussion.

“You can read the first post and read what everybody has done and then you know why the presentation is where it is because you know what everybody has done in the whole process.”

Working out loud (WOL) in this way captures the entire process, including why decisions have been made.

“We call it working out loud, or working in the narrative, and the way I often talk about this is that everything in our organisation behaves like a story. It updates or it continues over time,” Jaap said.

In these examples below, there was no need for team meetings to carry out this work, it was all done in the Teams channel.

WOL = shorter meetings

“One of the things we notice is that Teams is just used for meetings and a lot of meetings have stuff in them that doesn’t really belong in meetings, you can do it in a threaded conversation if you work out loud like this, you wouldn’t need to put it on the meeting agenda because everybody has done what they need to do - they’ve replied, they’ve reviewed it,” Jaap said.

“When we have meetings where we want to talk about, or make decisions about, certain deliverables we also have a channel for it and each meeting gets a date, then there’s an agenda created and these agenda items are links to specific deliverables.”

Team members are asked to click on the links to prepare prior to the meeting, so the meeting itself becomes more of a brainstorming session.

“If companies adopt this way of working, typically what you see is that the meetings become very short because the decision, in most cases, has already been made in the thread,” Jaap said.

“The meetings are mostly about brainstorming or really doing stuff where humans are needed.”

Make every meeting worthwhile

Jaap says every team should think about their meetings in the form of quantitative and qualitive. Quantitative meetings are those where the time is spent updating each other, presenting results etc, but where nothing new is actually achieved.

“Effectively, people just sit and tell each other what they’ve done,” Jaap said.

“That doesn’t need to be in a meeting. All of that can be in the threaded conversations where people can look at it in their own time, can respond, and by responding you also record the ideas that people have and the decision.”

Meetings should be focused, Jaap says, on qualitative results.

“So really brainstorming. And the bottom line here is what you should always try to do is to make sure that meetings have a deliverable, an outcome, so that you produce something in a meeting,” Jaap said.

“It’s not just to update each other because all updating can be done in the threaded conversation.

“That’s the way we use the working out loud to get rid of a lot of meetings.”

Housekeeping in Teams

Jaap says it’s also savvy to ensure there is structure within Teams. He often sees clients whose Teams sites are a mess. People post new documents or conversations without starting or joining a thread.

“They don’t stick to threads, they post individual messages so that it becomes disjointed and that’s one of the things we’re very meticulous about,” he said.

Structure conversations in Teams by starting with a title and post describing what the thread is about and the expected outcome.

“Describe some clear things that you want from people and then stick to that thread,” Jaap said.

He says, for OrangeTrail, these working out loud guidelines have led to highly productive teams and form the basis of any advice they share with clients.

Hear more expert advice from Jaap Linssen in this video. You’ll love his line: “A fool with a tool is still a fool!” It's not about the tool, it's about how you use it. Watch here.