In a lot of organisations is work from home still required because of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The communication to your colleges or Employees is very important.
I see in my daily practice that a lot of WhatsApp messages and groups are created. But not everyone is happy with this kind of behaviour. For example, when you have weekend, not everyone is happy with a message from work.
Notifications are the number 1 reason for losing concentration during your work.

Did you think about an organisation wide team page?
I will explain more.

What is an organisation wide team?

Org-wide teams provide an automatic way for everyone in a small to medium-sized organization to be a part of a single team for collaboration.
With org-wide teams, global admins can easily create a public team that pulls in every user in the organization and keeps the membership up to date with Active Directory.

Some limitations

  • An org-wide team is limited to organizations with no more than 5,000 users
  • There is also a limit of five org-wide teams per tenant.
  • Only global admins can create org-wide teams and currently

Keep in mind

When an org-wide team is created, all global admins and Teams service administrators are added as team owners and all active users are added as team members. Unlicensed users are also added to the team. The first time an unlicensed user signs into Teams, the user is assigned a Microsoft Teams Exploratory license!
These types of accounts will not be added to your org-wide team:

  • Accounts that are blocked from sign in
  • Guest users
  • Service accounts
  • Room or equipment accounts
  • Accounts backed by a shared mailbox

As your organization’s directory is updated to include new active users or if users no longer work at your company and their account is disabled, changes are automatically synced and the users are added or removed from the team. Team members cannot leave an org-wide team. As a team owner, you can manually add or remove users if needed.
A user can manage his own notification settings for teams, based on availability, calendar settings and profile settings. So, less chance of distraction.

Best practices

To get the most out of your org-wide team, I recommend that team owners do the following.

  • Allow only team owners to post to the General channel
    Reduce channel noise by having only team owners post to the General channel. Go to the team, locate the General channel, and then select ˙˙˙ More options > Manage channel. On the Channel settings tab, click Permissions, and then select Only owners can post messages.
  • Turn off @team and @[team name] mentions
    Reduce @mentions to keep them from overloading the entire organization. Go to the team and click ˙˙˙ More options > Manage Team. On the Settings tab, click @mentions > turn off Show members the option to @team or @ [team name].
  • Automatically show important channels
    Show important channels to ensure everyone in your organization engages in specific conversations. To learn more, see Auto-favorite channels for the whole team.
  • Set up channel moderation
    Consider setting up channel moderation and giving moderator capabilities to certain team members. (When moderation is set up, team owners are given moderator capabilities automatically.) Moderators can control who can start a new post in a channel, add and remove moderators, control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages, and control whether bots and connectors can submit channel messages. For more information, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.
  • Remove accounts that might not belong
    Even though members cannot leave an org-wide team, as a team owner, you can manage the team roster by removing accounts that don’t belong. Make sure you use Teams to remove users from your org-wide team. If you use another way to remove a user, such as the Microsoft 365 admin center or from a group in Outlook, the user might be added back to the org-wide team.
  • Extension or replacement of your intranet?
    Do you have an intranet in your organization and what is its purpose? Most of my customers have an intranet based on SharePoint. Can an org-wide team replace their current intranet? Probably not. But maybe it can be a useful extension. If you have a classic publishing intranet in SharePoint and if you want to offer the possibility to discuss certain news with all employees and to inform them about these news via a notification, you can create a post in Teams for this scenario. The post can even be done automatically with a Flow during the publishing process in SharePoint.
  • Create a “ChitChat” or “Coffee machine” channel for the normal day to day chat that you normally have with your college’s or employees.