A Microsoft Teams channel does a great job of keeping relevant materials easily accessible and notifying team members of any updates or posts. However, it can have some blind spots. Although your internal collaboration may all happen in Teams, your projects and initiatives don’t exist in a vacuum and you could be missing out on a pivotal ingredient… emails!
What’s missing without email
Third-party vendors, customers, strategic partners, distributors, and/or external consultants are important pieces of the puzzle operating outside your organization and beyond your Microsoft Teams channels. Their updates on timelines, deliverables, costs, and requirements changes are essential pieces of new information your colleagues need, but the bulk of those communications happen via email and don’t get visibility within Teams.
Email exchanges—and their attachments—provide unrivaled detail and context needed for efficient and accurate collaboration. They may even signal the need to suddenly shift resources, adjust scope, or escalate to senior management.
Arm your colleagues with additional context
The back-and-forth email exchange with external legal counsel about contract provisions, the thread with a supplier that included key schematic details, or the email with the special handling instructions that wouldn’t fit on the customer’s purchase order PDF… That knowledge remains trapped in someone’s Outlook inbox instead of getting shared with colleagues. This creates an incomplete and fractured view of the situation, which was exactly what you were trying to avoid by using Teams in the first place!
When collaborators share relevant emails to Teams as soon as they receive them, however, information sharing occurs nearly instantaneously. Information gaps shrink, deadlines aren’t missed, and everyone is operating with the same facts and resources.
There’s also now a consolidated historical record of those emails posted to the channel in near real-time. This creates accountability and makes it easier to fact-find and determine root causes during after-action analyses when needed. It might even help the organization protect itself legally during contract disputes, preserving relevant correspondence on Teams.
Improve business continuity
Employee turnover is an ongoing issue for many organizations, and regardless of why a coworker leaves, whoever remains must pick up the pieces and continue conducting business. Ideally, every soon-to-be-former colleague would methodically catalog all their digital records and perform a detailed handoff and knowledge transfer to those taking over their duties.
However, reality tends to be a lot messier. The short-handed workers left behind must scramble, trying not to let any details slip through the cracks as they strive to maintain project schedules, customer relationships, and logistical workflows.
This includes the email threads of former colleagues who conducted numerous conversations with internal and external individuals and businesses, which more likely than not end up stuck in ex-employee Outlook inboxes. Unreachable, unsearchable, and unknowable to anyone else, those emails represent both a danger and a missed opportunity.
The danger is that the organization lacks key information that could impact the business. Maybe it’s a key customer left hanging, their issues unaddressed and growing increasingly frustrated and impatient. Or perhaps it’s a supplier holding up a key order while waiting for a shipping address confirmation. If others in the organization knew about these things, they’d take action, but locked away in Outlook, there’s no way for them to know.
And while there’s no shortage of potential doomsday scenarios, those siloed email messages also represent missed opportunities. It could have been a hot prospect just about ready to sign on the dotted line. Or a now-past deadline to secure a key speaking slot at an industry trade show, or a lively exchange with an R&D partner in another site, now snuffed out on the vine.
While a thoughtfully cataloged and organized collection of emails and files in Teams may be convenient for the remaining workers after someone else leaves, that’s not a compelling incentive to get current employees to take action. Instead, colleagues must experience the value of this extra effort firsthand and see the wisdom of saving things in the right spot from the start.
Luckily, getting messages and files out of Outlook and into Teams benefits everyone involved. Individuals are no longer information gatekeepers or bottlenecks. No more dealing with interruptions during meetings or vacations from colleagues requesting a specific file or email. They’re now discoverable by everyone in Teams and any given employee’s absence—even temporary ones due to injury or illness or a sabbatical—won’t slow the rest of the team down.
Email disposition and retention
Aside from some operational productivity benefits of sharing emails to Teams, it also pays dividends on the regulatory and legal compliance fronts.
Your organization should have established policies that define which emails and files should be retained, how long they should be kept, designated storage locations, access controls, and organizational recommendations.
This process begins by determining which emails qualify as records. Information is considered a record if it was created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or during a business transaction. According to RIMtech, only about 5% of emails are records.
Examples of records include:
- Invoices
- Employee performance reviews
- Contracts
- Final versions
- Anything required to be retained for legal or regulatory purposes.
Dispositioned email selected for retention then needs an end date determined and whether or not it is archived at that point or completely destroyed.
Using Teams or SharePoint for this repository brings a few advantages. SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are existing, familiar, in-house solutions, and both contain the structural raw materials for retaining and sharing emails. harmon.ie takes the existing Microsoft environment end users already know and makes it seamless to store and share emails on SharePoint or Teams all from within Outlook, providing a robust email retention solution.
Want to see how harmon.ie facilitates saving emails in Teams? Download a free trial, or book a demo.
