Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Bruce Christian Senior Editor bruce@bekabusinessmedia.com Brady Hicks Contributing Editor brady@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Rob Schubel Digital Manager rob@bekabusinessmedia.com Jennifer Vilaboy Production Manager jen@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2022 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. RWS and the RWS logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media Shortly after adoption of Microsoft Teams and other cloud collaboration platforms exploded to accommodate newly dispersed workforces, meeting frequency was highlighted as a potential downside to working from home. After Microsoft reported on the unprecedented growth in Teams minutes-of-use, we heard about the possibility of digital communications “fatigue” among heavy UCaaS users. As it turns out, inactivity on the platformsmay be a bigger problem than any overuse. In the cover story this issue (see page 14), we point out how UCaaS platform users mostly have been utilizing the more legacy types of communications features found on MS Teams (such as emails, calls and chats), while newer “digital teaming” types of functionalities (document and storage sharing, group channels and app integration) are being underutilized. An extensive analysis by Swoop Analytics also showed that workers experiencing back-to-back meetings are very much in the minority. More than 70 percent of staff had less than one meeting every two days, while only a sliver was having meetings every hour of the day. Looking deeper into activity levels on digital team spaces, meanwhile, Swoop Analytics found that a common characteristic of digital collaboration platforms is a high proportion of largely inactive shared spaces. On average, the percentage of active teams during a three-month benchmarking period was 26 percent, meaning the vast majority of team spaces that are created eventually become dormant. Things weren’t much better among the cohort of power users of Teams. In some ways, the large amount of dormant team spaces is not surprising, Swoop researchers point out. It’s not uncommon for a space to be created for every project, large or small, and left up for future reference. Shared spaces also can be required for certain recurrent events or end-of-period reporting. “For the majority of organizations, the creation of a team on Teams is largely unconstrained,” said the collaboration analytics firm. “Leaving team creation and growth to organic processes is seen as consistent with appropriate use of modern digital platforms, due to the low cost of hosting collaboration spaces.” Storage is cheap, after all, so it’s hardly worth the resources to manage this tail of inactive teams. Better to concentrate on those that are working. On the other hand, a failure of governance, and “the long tail” of inactive spaces, argued the Swoop Analytics report, “represents digital noise that can impact on the effective use of the platform and security risks if guests can still access resources beyond their active participation.” That’s not to suggest that organizations should shift resources to a culling of dormant digital workspaces, albeit a growing concern. More to the point is how inactivity levels on collaboration platforms re-emphasize the reality that organizational adoption is only the first step to driving a return on IT investments. Consider for example that of the nearly 100,000 digital teams across 33 organizations accessed for the Swoop Analytics benchmarking analysis, less than 3 percent had sufficient “active membership” to be included in a more detailed analysis of team space activity levels. The ‘Long Tail’ of Inactive Teams 6 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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