In this blog series I’m exploring what I think are the Microsoft Teams usage traps that are really easy to fall into but not so helpful productivity-wise. Hopefully you can relate and add some more ideas into the comments!

Deadly sin number 4 is going to be a Marmite issue I think; but don’t worry audience, I’m ready and willing to split you into 2 camps.

There’s definitely a case to be made for Group Chats in Teams. Giving people easy access to each other, having a bit of banter, getting some quick question/answers tackled without the need for a full-on meeting… I get it.

HOWEVER – for running disparate concurrent projects / workstreams / whatever you want to call them, group chat becomes a maze of lost good ideas, hard-to-find updates, and tasks uncaptured (and therefore unactioned!).

What’s the difference between a group chat and a channel?

I thought you’d never ask. A group chat is like a WhatsApp group, but on Teams. (Hopefully you haven’t been living under a rock and know what WhatsApp is…) It’s one long stream of asynchronous chat messages in one window that you can scroll forever up and down in. Unless you pin it, the group chat lives in the same place as all your other chats. You can share files in group chat and add in apps like Trello and Polly, so I see the temptation to use it as a working place, you could have your project boards and your team polls all just right there.

A channel is different because:

• It lives under a Team, so you’ve immediately got some context/categorisation about the conversations that happen there
• You can split conversations up into threads, so that discussion topics and replies are grouped together sensibly rather than just being in one bottomless bucket

You can add files and apps in channels too, so it’s still perfect for a working space.

When I first started at Empowering.Cloud – as there is a team of only 4 of us, we defaulted to a group chat to discuss or work through most of our day-to-day ‘stuff’. As we were all spinning many plates, it didn’t take long for us to clutter up the chat with so many disparate things that it became impossible to know where we were with anything! Even searching for key words so that we could try to pick up old chats was a nightmare and hardly ever worked.  

So – we broke things back up into teams and channels and voila – suddenly there was a sensible place for different conversations to go, and updates made more sense, and things aren’t getting lost, and it’s much better.

It’s not perfect, and sometimes it’s tempting to jump back into the group chat, but channel conversations are much easier to navigate than endlessly scrolling through a single chat and thinking of keywords to search to find what you’re looking for.

What do you think? Group chats all the way? Or channels, channels and more channels? Let me know what’s working for you in the comments.