Training Your Team . . . for Effective Use of Teams, Skype and Skype for Business
Most people have some familiarity with Skype and Skype for Business but as with any very powerful tool, your business team can have more effective communication and collaboration with training and practice - including training for the new Microsoft Teams.
There's an efficient new way to provide training, so all the main business features are known and your team members are up to speed.
End user training for Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/enduser-trainingMar 18, 2018 - Training resources an admin can use to successfully deploy and adopt Microsoft Teams.In these guides, Microsoft has developed powerful short videos to take you & your team quickly through the popular business features. The videos are about one minute each. Maybe you can just ask your team to take or watch one lesson a day?
It's one thing to have good conferencing and collaboration technology . . . it's another to make it work effectively in your organization. There's an approach that we like to planning effective daily, weekly & monthly meetings. It's in "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm [Hardcover]"
Here are some recommended procedures for significant & efficient meetings:
Test Calls, Production & Monitoring
Schedule a test call between the locations at least 24 hours prior to the conference, and 10 to 15 min before the meeting, connect up the remote sites. During each test and prior to the meeting run through the following checklist : Lighting, Microphones, Speaker Sound, Camera Angles/Presets and PTZ camera control, Network Bandwidth, Recording, Streaming. Assign someone to monitor these at each location. Assign someone to initiate the call. Assign someone as the chairperson/moderator for the meeting. Assign someone to keep notes.
Setup a group for the meeting participants - in Skype via Group Chat & Text Messages, & via Outlook for email and calendar appointments. Send Agendas, Notices, Materials, & Notes in advance. We also recommend using a reminder service via Skype & Outlook.
Meeting Planning, Agendas & Follow-Up:
In most organizations, employees should be in some kind of daily and weekly meeting with their team.
A Suggested Quick Daily Meeting Agenda - 6 to 10 minutes:
2 minutes - What's up? A quick go-around - Headlines, activities, meetings, accomplishments, news.
2 minutes - Daily measurements of goals for yesterday and today.
2 minutes - Where are you stuck? Where's the bottleneck? What can be done about it?
When is your Daily Meeting going to be? _______________________
Who is going to attend? _____________________________________
Will it be a video & audio conference call or a stand up meeting? _________________
What locations? ____________________________________________
A Suggested Weekly Meeting Agenda – 30 to 60 minutes:
5 minutes -- Good News. Go around the group and have everyone share a SPECIFIC good news story, personal and business, from the past week.
5 minutes -- The Numbers. Go over Smart Numbers, Critical Number, and everyone's individual or team weekly measures of productivity.
5 minutes -- Customer & Employee Data. Are there are any recurring issues or concerns that the team or its customers are facing day in and day out.
10 minutes – Focus for the Week. Have the team to drill in on one big issue for the week. Have the person with accountability make a presentation on how they are addressing the issue.
Wrap-Up – Let everyone say a word or phrase that represents how they feel at that moment about the meeting.
Keep a log/recording of who said they would do what when.
This 30 to 60 minutes each week, if effective, will help make everyone's job easier and more productive. If it's not, reexamine how the meeting is being run and what is being discussed but don’t quit this rhythm.