In terms of work this was the first full week of distributed working.
I spent a fair bit of time coaching colleagues on how to work more effectively using Teams. I think one of the hardest things for people who are first exposed to the messaging side of the application is to learn a more considered approach when posting in a channel. The difference between a new post and a comment seems very hard for some people to pick up, and I think the app could do more to signal to people that channel chat and messaging chat behave differently.
This was however a great opportunity to use the 10P’s framework to guide a conversation about the design of a new Team and it seems to resonate with people. Even had colleagues suggesting “fewer internal emails” as a KPI.
One of the suggestions in the book is to forward email sent to the team to a channel in the Team. Many of our workgroups have a shared email address that is used both for inbound customer communications and internal collaboration. It’s easy enough to set up an Exchange Online mail flow rule to redirect the internal email, but that won’t work for incoming external mail. On a redirect Teams sees the email as coming from the external domain and bounces it. This might need Power Automate to do a forward, although that feels like overkill.
Other areas of work were about moving elements of our CPD offer online.
Life under corona
This was the first week of lockdown - all non-essential shops closed, finally a clear requirement for pubs and restaurants to close, instructions to minimise trips outside the home and maintain “social distancing”.
Within a couple of days shops that remain open were throttling the number in store to keep people apart, and together with purchase restrictions this seems to have eliminated the worst examples of empty shelves.
It still feels very strange to look out over a near silent city.
