Tuesday's Tip #59: March is Why Use Teams Month. Reason #1 - Chat vs Email

teams Mar 03, 2021

Teams is a Paradigm Shift in HOW you Work

As I teach more and more Teams classes, one of the most common responses after our training users say things like, "Wow, it's a lot more than I thought?" or "Oh man, it's so much more than just chat."

One of the things that is hard to learn without training - is that using Teams as an organization is a paradigm shift. It is more than just, checking to see if anyone sent you a chat. Full Teams utilization means collaborating with your colleagues in an easy, seamless, organic way to co-work on documents, share files, meet virtually, call and work collaboratively.

Why Chat?

The idea of when to chat and when to email is confusing for most people at first in Teams. Initially, Teams just seems like more work, yet another app to keep tabs on. However, after you learn more about Teams and when to use it and when not to, it starts to come together and actually SAVE time. And don't we ALL want to SAVE TIME!

Emails Versus Chats

Emails will probably never go away, but Teams changes the landscape for sure and will almost definitely reduces the number of emails you send.

The general rule of thumb is, you will continue to send emails especially externally for things like client, contractor, customer and vendor communication, proposals, work orders, sales quotes and other similar and often times more formal communication needs.

Chats will eliminate many of the informal "one-liner" emails. For example, emails like "send me that file", "want to go to lunch?", "did you hear back from client xyz?", "are you available for a quick meeting?" etc. These internal communications can clog up our inbox with insignificant, one-liner emails. Teams can help eliminate those.

Persistent Chat

This is a phrase that Microsoft uses. The idea is, when you start a chat with someone in Teams, it remains indefinitely. The reason being, when Skype was the main way to chat, often times these messages didn't get saved - and therefore it never really replaced emails because invariably, business tends to get done in these chats and we need to be able to look back at them. Persistent chat is what allows us to do that. If we send a message today to a co-worker - in 6 months if we go to send another one - that will still be visible and saved. Therefore, if we need to refer to it - we easily can.

More than Chat...