The Financial Benefits of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a productivity tool released by Microsoft a little over two years ago, which is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of products. It provides a single pane of glass view across the rest of Microsoft 365 by bringing together chat, content, collaboration, meetings and voice into one application which integrates further with third-party and internal systems to facilitate faster and smarter working.

Since being released in February 2017 Teams has proven to be the fastest growing business application released by Microsoft to date, with it now in use by more than 500k organisations. 91% of the Fortune 500 use Teams, and it is used in more than 180 markets with support for 44+ languages. I have personally seen the impact that Teams delivers to organisations through changing ways of working and driving digital transformation, but until now it has been difficult to quantify the financial impact of the productivity and efficiency improvements that it offers.

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams. This study looks at the possible financial benefits which can be realised by implementing Teams effectively as part of a wider Microsoft 365 deployment.

The benefits highlighted in this report have been adjusted to account for an organisation with 5,000 users - of which 3,500 are information workers and 1,500 are firstline workers.

• Dramatically, organisations using Teams effectively experience almost a 20% reduction in meetings each year. Additionally, meetings held via Teams are reliable, of very high audio and video quality and result in less time spent dealing with technical issues. Information workers have more productive meetings with a need for less meetings overall, and less travel for face to face meetings. Over three years this equates to a saving of £5.3 million.
• Information workers save 4 hours per week through improved collaboration and information sharing. In an organisation with 3,500 information workers, this equates to savings of £11million over a 3-year period.
• Decision makers improve their time to decision by 17.7% through using Teams. This is a direct benefit of having information and resources readily available via the Teams shared workspace, and being able to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and effectively. This leads to savings of £350k over three years.

When combined, the financial benefits identified through this quantitative research total more than £23 million with costs of £2.5 million.

It is clear from this research that the financial benefits of delivering Teams to your organisation are huge, with it delivering significant returns on investment over a three year period. It also delivers tangible business outcomes which help your employees work better, smarter and more effectively, and which drives digital transformation across both information and frontline workers. It can also drive better on-boarding experiences for new employees and help deliver improved employee satisfaction.

Click here to read the Forrester report in full. Teams has been making my life easier for the last two years, and I've seen the benefit this has already delivered to several clients. If you'd like to know more about how we can help you unlock the value in Microsoft Teams, get in touch.