Work centers are changing. The rules of the work environment are no longer the same. Business requires constant innovation to succeed in this new economy.
However, few know how to do it, or they don’t have the work team to achieve it.
Today, to innovate, companies require collaboration between different disciplines, geographies, and cultures.
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, mentions that “Prior to this radical change in the workplace, the atomic unit of productivity was the individual. Now it’s the team.”
A High-Performance team is not enough
High-performance teams bring together talented individuals, and when they operate, they are more than the sum of their parts. Each team member offers their strengths. Among them, the limitations that each has been compensated.
The Microsoft executive mentions that this world “increasingly distributed and accelerated” is not enough with a team that finds how to collaborate and move forward together. “Today’s teams also require collaboration tools that help them put that chemistry to work,” says Spataro. “They need technology that can reach through space and time and help team members feel they are only a few meters away, even when continents separate them.”
Watching successful teams
To help work teams become successful teams, Microsoft partnered with the design company IDEO. This company maintains an interdisciplinary, people-centered approach.
With this alliance, both companies were given the task of investigating what more successful teams in the workplace have in common. With this experience, they created The Art of Teamwork – a new digital curriculum built around five attributes of a successful team.
The research results also served to improve Microsoft’s product Teams, which is a center for teamwork in Microsoft 365.
Spataro points out that, based on the data released by the research, it is clear that “the future of collaboration in the workplace will not be defined by any technology”. Actually, it is a set of technologies and that these are combined innovatively. The goal is to be a tool for collaboration.
Teams have sought this versatility. The Microsoft product brings together chat, calls, document collaboration, and workflows, in one application. The combination of these tools has allowed it to become popular quickly.
Spataro mentions that “Teams currently has more than 20 million daily active users.”
These users can start with the simple text-based chat of the application. However, in a short time, they adopt other forms of communication and collaboration that offer more possibilities.
“For example, a month ago Teams customers participated in more than 27 million voice or video meetings and performed more than 220 million actions to open, edit or download files stored in Teams,” says the executive.
The five attributes of successful teams
Microsoft and IDEO investigated various groups in the workplace: a range from astronauts to nurses, to chefs and television producers. The objective was to understand what high-performance collaborators have in common.
With this variety of equipment in the workplace as subjects of study, the researchers used techniques such as context observation, interviews with experts, secondary research, and prototype activities to identify the specific dynamics that high-performance teams have in common.
From this research, it was found that successful teams share these five attributes:
- Team Purpose – Keeps teams focused, satisfied, and aligned in achieving their goals.
- Collective identity – Promotes a sense of belonging and helps team members work together as a unit.
- Awareness and inclusion – Allows teams to navigate interpersonal dynamics and value everyone’s perspective.
- Confidence and vulnerability – Promotes interpersonal risk-taking in teams.
- Constructive tension – It serves as a generating force for new ideas, which drives better results.
To learn more about the framework, watch the video below:
Teams success stories
Here are some of the cases studied by Microsoft and Ideo that exemplify the attributes of the unbeaten teams described above:
Bold Beauty: L’Oreal
In L’Oreal, the global beauty company, Barbara Lavernos, director of technology and chief of operations, explains, “Our impulse is driven by people who interact, put ideas on the table, and jump on them through a discussion spontaneous The new technology that allows real personality, contributions and innovation is Microsoft Teams.” With Teams, L’Oreal employees have a space to be creative as they move at the speed and scale necessary to deliver more than 7 billion products to customers each year.
From the manufacturing plant to managers: Alcoa
Frontline Workers in Alcoa, a world leader in the production of bauxite, alumina, and aluminum, has adopted Teams to access business information on their own mobile devices while working in their remote facilities in Iceland. Before using Teams, when managers needed someone to cover a shift, they had to call them, often at night. Now with Teams, managers schedule plant employees through Shifts, which they can access from their mobile devices. With Shifts, the problem of workers missing out on scheduled tasks has been resolved, and the absenteeism rate has dropped almost to zero. “Shifts in Teams is much more efficient for organizing people,” said Friopjófur Tómasson, the plant supervisor. “If I had to use a word to tell them what Teams mean to me, it would be ‘efficiency. ‘Shifts saves me at least an hour a day.”
Simplified collaboration: Telefónica
At Telefónica, the telecommunications company, employees carry out business construction projects in Teams. An executive meeting outside the office can now be coordinated in a centralized place with high security. The coordination of this simple meeting was a nightmare, with up to 20 colleagues from various departments focused on numerous sources of work. “Before Teams, we had to integrate different aspects of a project that had been created in isolation between them. Now, a group of colleagues can build on the documents collaboratively and edit the project directly. This process took four weeks, now we can get it in a matter of days,” said Jamie Rodriguez-Ramos Fernandez, director of strategic analysis at Telefónica.
Pay attention to the patient first: St. Luke University Health Network (SLUHN)
The providers of the St. Luke University Health Network (SLUHN) have begun to replace third-party collaborative applications with Teams, to simplify their lives with a single workspace and have conversations about patients Anytime, anywhere. “Even when we look for secure text messaging as one of the advantages of the ubiquitous cell phone, we still have to comply with HIPAA and other privacy requirements,” said Dr. James Balshi, director of medical information and vascular surgery at SLUHN. “But with Teams, we don’t have to worry about that. It is equally functional on the smartphone, on the tablet, and on the desktop computer. I use camera technology on the phone to share patient information with colleagues during a Teams video call in a more secure manner, which complies with HIPAA. I also shared EMR notes and X-ray images.”
Connect worldwide: Trek
Trek is a designer, manufacturer, and marketer of bicycles that has quickly adapted to a changing environment. Some employees located in the United States work in locations other than the company’s headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, including additional facilities, your home, or retail stores. Trek’s international business has also increased with the company’s expansion of operations to 17 offices established around the world. “Having good connectivity and digital meeting experiences is critical to how successful we work,” said Nathan Pieper, application manager and business IT collaboration at Trek. Teams meeting capabilities “were what made people go inside,” Pieper said. “The adoption of Teams grew because people used it, told others to use it, and invited them to online meetings in it.”