In this blog series I’m exploring some of Microsoft Teams stumbling blocks that you may (or may be lucky enough not to) recognise.  

Deadly sin number 6 is one I’ve definitely found frustrating in the past. If you are working in an organisation that uses Microsoft Teams, in my opinion there is literally no need to send internal emails to your colleagues – use Teams instead!

If you need to:

• Ask a simple question
• Ask a complicated question
• Get feedback on a document
• Share something useful (or that you think is useful anyway)
• Check-in on how someone’s doing (a genuine ‘how are you?’ goes a long way)
• Get help on how to respond to a customer’s question
• Find out dietary requirements ahead of a lunch meeting
• Check availability for a meeting

And the person or people you’re reaching out to are internal within your organisation you can do all this on Teams – I kid you not.

When you start an email thread involving two or more other people, the responses become disjointed, document attachments can start to fly off into different versions, it’s hard to keep track of which is the most up to date part of the thread to respond to, and generally…

Instead, you can start a Teams chat with someone, or a group of people, and keep everything together asynchronously. You can co-edit documents within the same chat, and use apps for things like polling to find the best meeting times, or forms for dietary requirements.

Given that email inbox clutter has been a problem for an absolute age, I’m so surprised that people still default to email instead of using Teams. I guess it’s a habit thing and I know muscle memory is hard to change. Do we need to stop assuming levels of user education and go back to basics?

There likely are cases for when internal emails are better than using Teams (HR ones spring to mind) and I’m always open to being persuaded… so what do you think?

Do you have a case to make for using email internally? Or have you seen the light of using Teams for internal collab instead? Hit me up in the comments!