If this is you, hopefully this blog will help! 

Microsoft Teams can be a bit of a maze and become a mess quickly if organisations don’t publish best practices for employees on how to use it. A frustration I often hear is “Where is it in Teams?”, or “I can’t find anything in Teams”, or some other version with more expletives. 

If you find yourself in this situation often, here are some tips that might help you out: 

Use the search bar 

There’s a search bar right at the top of Teams, and it’s surprisingly easy to forget that it’s there. 

If you’re looking for a document and you can remember a fairly unique key word, typing that into the search bar will bring up results from all across Teams, including documents (within documents, not just document titles), channel and chat messages. The results are all filterable so you can quickly narrow down to what you’re looking for. It’s really rather clever. If you type in a generic term however, you will likely get lots of results to filter down. 

Set some ground rules

Agree with the people that you most often collaborate with how best to share documents so that you can all easily find them again later. 

If you are in a group chat, establish that you will save everything into ‘Files’ for that chat, and name the chat something useful so that you can easily find it again. 

If you are working out of Teams and channels, ensure that folder structures are set up for all to understand and ask people to commit to using them in an agreed way. 

Ideally you’d set these ground rules at the start of collaborating on a project with a group, but it’s easy enough to re-establish some ground rules partway through, and worth doing as it will speed everyone up.

Organise your teams alphabetically 

Once you are a member of more than a handful of Teams, navigating the full list of them on the left hand side can be tricky business. I like to organise my Teams alphabetically, so that I can find what I need quicker. 

Pin your most-used channels

If there are channels that you use regularly, you can also click on the three dots next to the channel name and ‘Pin’ them to the top of your Teams list for easy access.

Ask for guidance from your organisation  

In my view, organisations should take a good look at how their employees are using Teams and invest in providing clear guidance, so that employees don’t have to fill in the gaps themselves and create lots of sprawl on the platform. 

Can you quantify the amount of time that you spend looking for documents in Teams? If you are struggling, likely your colleagues are too, and if you can present some numbers on how much time people are spending getting lost in Teams, that might encourage your organisation to start getting a handle on the sprawl. 

Did this blog help? Do you have any ideas on how to navigate Teams more easily? I’d love to hear in the comments.