First, we needed to ensure we can talk to each other, meet online, adapt to the new remote working reality. Video conferencing tools emerged everywhere – daily checkup calls, weekly team meetings, project planning sessions and sales review meetings. Quickly we took communication platforms to maintain our personal connections during social distancing, then Pilates, doctor’s appointments, choir practice and after work drinks with friends moved to Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

We’ve all seen the meme Who Led Your Digital Transformation? Your CIO or COVID-19? Suddenly basic digital collaboration capabilities are mainstream. Quick, habit changing digital leaps are possible.

One winner in covid-19 pandemic has been Microsoft Teams – chat, meet, call, collaborate from anywhere. Suddenly it feels like everyone is using it, but it could be so much more than online meetings, chats or access to files! Imagine a truly digital workplace that elevates the daily social interactions into execution plans, decisions and collaboration. A cloud service to complement the physical workplace more than ever before.

What next? With remote work continuing into 2021 it means we have to learn to cope with new kind of noise and hurdles. We managed the first wave of transformation and even increased productivity in some parts. But from the experience of organizations on the digital path we need to learn that it is a lot more than just collaboration and access to information. We need to have an abstraction level above to tame the noise. We need to make sense of the ever–growing data, turn it into information we can draw conclusions and finally truly make the necessary decisions. Microsoft Teams is not up to this task at the moment. Not by itself at least.

Gary Hamel points to the rise of collaboration tools in his new book Humanocracy. For the most part, they’re used to simply improve team productivity through the likes of shared calendars and docs. Thus far, collaborative tools have been mostly used to expedite project work. While they could be used to crowd source strategy development, capital allocation and change management.

Value is in the information we share, our insights, small signals, conclusions and the decisions we make. It is in our capability to make decisions and execute them. We demonstrate it in our ability to follow progress and be truly agile and adopt to the changing market around us. This requires accountability, transparency and collaboration.

On top of improved collaboration, we need the big picture for leadership. We need to connect the everyday work to the bigger picture. The new remote work view should include visibility to progress and the setting and status of objectives. We need to improve our clock speed of good decision making. Empower accountable decision making, give your team more power, agility and freedom! This will increase motivation and commitment. Digitized processes also increase knowledge creation, retention and learning.

Getting back to who is leading the digital transformation: Microsoft Teams is really pushing to become the destination for centralized working. For Teams to become incremental to everyday work and keep providing true value to productivity, it needs Apps.

Fingertip is a leadership App for modern work and for today’s distributed organizations. And yes, Fingertip is a perfect add to your Teams, adding value to your discussions and collaboration with decision making, objectives management, planning and impactful execution.