Microsoft Teams can really boost your company productivity, but like many collaborative tools, you have to find the right balance between letting users take "ownership" of the tool, but also control on some part of it, so that it does not become chaos.
Guideline 1: Create Organization Teams and Project Teams
The first activity that you will do when joining Microsoft Teams is to create new Teams.
Creating Organization Teams are pretty straightforward as they often follow HR Organization: Accounting team, IT team, HR team, ...
Creating Project teams are needed whenever you have .. a project :D
By extension, when a group of (cross departments) people need to collaborate together (communicate & share documents), it is worth creating a new Project teams.
Guideline 2: Restrict users who can create new Teams & new Channels
As employee will be sharing information and files in Teams, it is critical that managers control this flow of information. The same way head of departments will organize their physical teams, they need to do the same for their virtual teams.
We would recommend that only Senior managers in an organization can create new Teams
Once a new Team is created, Team creator can add new Owner(s) and delegate the Team management.
By extension, you should also restrict creation of new channels to Teams owner only.
Guideline 3: Leverage on Private Channel
Private Channel is a powerfull add on to Microsoft Teams. In short, Private channels are confidential area within a Teams that only a subset of Team Member can access.
Some typical use cases of using a Private channel are:
IT Team could have a public or org-wide setting, so that all employees could access information or discuss with IT team in the general channel. IT team could then have a private channel .. do discuss geek things.
Create a Managers/Supervisors channel to keep confidential information away from the rest of the team members.
In a matrix organization, you will often have information that you want to share globally, and other that you want to share only to a sub-team
To know how our Microsoft 365 experts can boost your organization collaboration to the next level, contact us: contact@kitameraki.com