Hey there, I'm Devin!
Most of the time you can catch me deep in the world of internal comms at Workshop (yes, the Happy Mondays folks!), and while I love AI, there are just some comms questions that need a human who really gets it… that’s me!
Hey Devin! I work with a number of stakeholders from different businesses, all coming together on one programme of work. They don’t yet all have access to a single platform (working on it!), and the Teams channel for them isn’t their default, so it’s not very well used. How can I bring them together as one team?
Hmm, I love this challenge! Because what you’re really describing is two problems in one — there’s the practical tooling piece (everyone’s scattered across platforms), and underneath it, the bigger, hairier one (how do a bunch of people from different businesses start to feel like a single team?). The opportunity here is that solving one sets you up to do the second!
First and foremost, I wouldn’t expect adoption to just… happen. People don’t drift into a new channel on their own, especially when it’s not where their workflow already lives. So I’d build an actual onboarding timeline and treat it like a rollout. Depending on how much room you’ve got, that might be a few weeks or even months, but either way, give it a real beginning, middle, and “okay, we’re all here now” moment. A vague hope that people will wander over eventually is not a plan!
A couple of things make that timeline land. One is showing people what good actually looks like for them. A finance stakeholder and a marketing stakeholder don’t use a channel the same way, so show examples tailored to their world, not just a generic “here’s how Teams works” demo. The other is live virtual trainings that you record and keep. The live part builds confidence in the moment; the recording means nobody’s stuck because they missed it or forgot which button does what. (People reference those recordings way more than you’d think.)
Now, here’s the realistic part: some folks still won’t make it their home base right away, and that’s okay. This is where I’d lean hard into meeting people where they are rather than forcing them where you wish they were. If someone’s living in their own business’s channel and not yet checking the shared one, is there a way to cross-post the need-to-know stuff into their space (automatically, ideally, so it’s not a manual chore for you)? Adoption isn’t all-or-nothing. Catching people in the channels they already use buys you goodwill while the longer transition happens in the background.
And don’t underestimate design. A channel people can actually navigate gets used; a cluttered one gets ignored. Pin the genuinely need-to-know stuff right at the top, keep the longer detail in linked documents rather than dumped into the feed, and make it so a brand-new person could land there and figure out what matters in about thirty seconds.
But circling back to that second problem, the “one team” feeling: the platform is the where, not the why. A shared channel won’t make people feel like one team on its own. What does is a shared sense of what you’re all building together. So as you roll this out, keep connecting the tool back to the mission. Celebrate wins from across the different businesses in that space, give people reasons to show up that aren’t purely transactional, and let the channel become the place where the programme’s story gets told. That’s when a group of stakeholders quietly turns into a team.
This is a great problem to be solving, by the way. Fingers crossed for a smooth rollout!
