Laurence Lock Lee

What Sort of ‘Team’ should I be aspiring to? Should I be on Microsoft Teams or Yammer?

This is the second post in a series of practical tips on how to successfully adopt Microsoft Teams in your workplace. Microsoft Teams has been established as the collaboration hub for Office 365 and will often become the first port of call for those looking to collaborate online. The more mature Yammer platform is now positioned for ‘Outer Loop’ enterprise-wide collaboration. The grey area between a ‘Public’ Team and a Yammer Group is, however, ever present.  Our own position is that Public groups are best hosted on Yammer, with the expectation that the Yammer growth path will provide features more…

You’ve created a Team on Microsoft Teams: Now What?

This is the first post in a series of practical tips on how to successfully adopt Microsoft Teams in your workplace. You created a team on Microsoft Teams and you probably found the ‘Create Team’ experience was as simple as can be. Hopefully you spent a bit of reflection time before you completed the ‘Description’ field, as it just might end up being the most important entry you will make for this team. Is it a statement of purpose? The reason others might want to join you in active collaboration? The scope of your aspirations for the team? Do you need to go back…

Teams and Projects – Setting Collaboration Performance Targets

We recently published the world’s largest benchmarking study of Workplace by Facebook networks covering 68 organisations and more than 630,000 people. In this report, for the first time, we have extended our analytics to the Workplace group level (Teams & Projects, Communities and Q&A Forums (Discussion), Announce and Social (non-work).  One of the immediate findings from the research into our sample of 1,360 teams is that digital teams are way too large to enjoy the benefits of being a truly high productive team.   At an average size of 296 members, there is little chance of achieving the level of cohesion and productivity that…

The story of a digital team – Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing

Team productivity is strongly linked to relationships formed and sustained by team members. With SWOOP Analytics’ newest product – SWOOP for Microsoft Teams – we can help you identify what type of teams you’re working with and adapt behaviours to help you reach more productive outcomes.  A productive team is more about relationship formation than simply activity, as proved in our 2016 research. If you are relying on activity measures to guide your collaboration and relationship building efforts, you may as well not bother. If you instead define engagement as people engaging with each other in productive collaboration, social cohesion and relationship–centred measures are essential. This is where SWOOP for Teams comes into play.  What Should Team Level…

Meet our ‘SWOOP for Microsoft Teams’ Personas

Ahead of the global launch of SWOOP Analytics’ newest product – SWOOP for Microsoft Teams –on July 1, 2019, we would like to introduce you to our SWOOP for Teams personas.  We know one of the biggest challenges for new adopters of Microsoft Teams is to rapidly show results. We also know from our extensive research on digital ‘teams’ that the average size of a digital team is almost 300 members, a group too big to be called a team. Therefore, many teams are teams in name only.   These team personas will immediately give you feedback on how your team is operating, at a quick glance. When you use these personas with SWOOP’s team social graph, you…

How Stable is your Digital Team?

We’ve taken a deep dive to analyse more than 1,300 digital teams and discovered some surprising results. While stability is easier to achieve in small teams, stability in larger teams could impact negatively on diversity and innovation, and sometimes lead to a toxic work environment.  Harvard University Team effectiveness guru Richard J. Hackman wrote that; “Real work teams in organizations have four features: a team task, clear boundaries, clearly specified authority to manage their own work processes, and membership stability over some reasonable period of time”.  At the time of writing this, digital teams were in their infancy; but few would argue these same…