Saints Sport adopt Microsoft Teams
Heather Gaunt, Marketing and Communications Manager for Saints Sport, the University’s Department of Sport and Exercise has kindly answered a few questions about their recent adoption of Microsoft Teams.
Provide a bit of background about your Unit. What services do you offer, how many staff are employed, are they desk-based/mobile?
We are Saints Sport. A multi-faceted organisation delivering a wide range of sporting opportunities to students, staff and community members.
Saints Sport manages all sport and fitness related activities, services and facilities at the University of St Andrews. We pride ourselves on our students’ ability to excel both in their academic and sporting endeavours and hold the student experience as a cornerstone of our strategy.
We have approximately 40 permanent members of staff, with a wider workforce made up of student interns, casual/bank contract staff including Junior Saints coaches, strength and conditioning interns, student club coaches, class instructors and personal trainers.
Approximately 20% of our workforce are office based and work Monday-Friday 9-5pm office hours. Therefore the majority of our workforce work flexible or variable hours and shift patterns.
What problem were you trying to solve when you implemented Teams?
We needed a central place for all staff to communicate with each other, share good practice, access documents, news and updates.   We needed to adopt working practices which suited the more project or matrix management approach. We also needed to enable staff to keep in touch, contribute and engage whilst working more flexibly and appreciative of the fact that no everyone was desk based.
We were working in a way that was heavily reliant on emails, not very engaging and not necessarily supportive of the working practices of our workforce.
How was the problem affecting you?
Low staff engagement in certain things, especially for those working irregular hours
Inability to send messages out quickly other than via email meant that staff were missing out on key information/updates.
Lack of understanding as to where key documents were saved therefore workforce were not wholly informed of key processes etc.
Project work was administered via email and therefore had limited functionality.
What benefits have you seen since implementing Teams?
Whole team engagement for project work.
Better communication in general leading to stronger staff engagement and morale
Better document sharing and access.
Ability to inform staff quickly as well as engage/consult/canvas etc
Reduction in email traffic and unnecessary email ‘noise’
Specific notable improvements:
- Benefits in handover of work or roles
- Supports staff and student interactions or group/team work
- Has positively impacted a lot of processes now delivered through Teams
- Has allowed better usage of other apps and Microsoft products i.e. Notes
- Reduction in money, time and effort spent on exploring other systems or programmes to use- generally most things are available through teams with the huge number of apps available
What’s your favourite feature(s) and why?
The ability to run a poll is pretty cool, but underutilised! If you want feedback on something it’s a really quick way to gauge peoples thoughts without taking up too much of their time.
We’ve started using the privacy settings more now you can have channels only viewed by certain people. Takes a bit of thought to think whether new teams are actually just channels with certain people in there through the privacy settings.
The designs/illustrations are good, although basic in some respects, but it allows you to make things stand out more and make things more relevant to bring peoples attention to posts etc.
The search function is great and helps you find things really easily, and also find additional functionality. Keep a check on the /whatsnew to learn what else Microsoft are bringing to the Teams party!!
We are now running meetings remotely via with people working remotely which has been so useful given the current situation.
What advice/ words of wisdom would you offer other departments?
Microsoft Teams is very intuitive. You can keep trying new apps and ways of working to find solutions. Don’t expect to go on a training course and get all the answers. The more you use it the better and keep thinking about what you want the system to do. The solutions are often in the way you set it up or the additional apps that can be integrated. You can gradually keeping adding elements once some of the basics are mastered.
Teams will transform your departments way of working in such a positive way, you’ll wonder what you ever did before Microsoft Teams was around!
Any other information you think would be handy for others to know!
There is a lot of advice and training online to help you. Majority is free and enables you to pick up new tips and tricks.
If you have a success story within your area that you’d like to share, please get in touch.