In a client session last week, a member of their digital champions group challenged me, politely, in front of everyone.

The client, a charity, is partway through moving to channel-based working in Microsoft Teams. For the first teams on, the rules are deliberately firm: internal collaboration goes in the channel, no internal email, no side chats. I'd just finished explaining why.

His challenge: that's a lot of stick. Where's the carrot? And then he told the best story I heard all month.

Frederick the Great wanted eighteenth-century Prussians to adopt the potato. Famine insurance, cheap calories, grows anywhere. The people wanted nothing to do with it, and royal decrees achieved nothing. So, the story goes (historians quibble over the details, but the lesson holds), Frederick changed tactics. He planted a royal potato garden, stationed armed guards around it, and privately instructed the guards to let thieves through.

If it's worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Locals stole the potatoes, planted their own, and adoption spread with no working decree ever issued.

Microsoft 365 adoption needs both forces, in sequence. Enforcement gets the first team over the habit hump, because nudges lose to "easier" and the old way is always easier at the start. Desire scales it from there: one team visibly better off is what makes every other team ask for the change.

The potato story is usually told as proof that clever incentives beat rules. In workplace technology adoption, that's half right, and the half matters.

A nudge works when the two options are close in effort and the nudge tips the balance. That's not the situation at the start of a rollout. The old way, email, side chats, the shared drive, is a deep groove worn over decades. The new way is unfamiliar and therefore effortful. The gap isn't a nudge-sized gap.

Watch the moment of failure and this becomes obvious. Someone emails a team member who's supposed to be working in channels. Replying by email takes zero thought. Moving the conversation to the channel takes deliberate effort. A poster on the wall and a gold star scheme do not win that moment. The ops lead at this same client put it perfectly: it takes a couple of seconds to forget, and the old habit does the rest.

In ADKAR terms: awareness and desire don't produce new behaviour on their own. Ability comes from repetition, and at the start, repetition has to be engineered.

So for the first team through, the rules are firm, and that firmness is a kindness, not a punishment.

Narrow: one team, one clear line. Internal collaboration goes in the channel. Anything private or personal stays private, but work talk lives in the open. This assumes the [channel structure itself is right](https://www.meetimeservices.com/blog/how-to-organise-microsoft-teams-small-business), which is a separate job worth doing first.

Brief: a few weeks, not forever. The enforcement phase exists to generate the repetitions that build the habit. Once the channel is the default, the rule mostly enforces itself, because now the channel is the easier option: the history is there, the files are there, the decisions are there.

At this client, the first team's lead reported that after an honest fortnight of catching himself and correcting, working in the channel was becoming habitual "surprisingly quickly". That's the hump. It's real, and it's short.

> Fixing this yourself? The full method for channels, files, tasks and the What Goes Where Agreement is in the [Chaos Cure](https://www.meetimeservices.com/chaos-cure), the self-guided Microsoft 365 playbook.

Once one team is over the hump, stop pushing and start showing.

The first team's channel is now your royal potato garden: real threads, real decisions, a team that visibly runs its week in the open. When people from other departments brush against it, in cross-team projects, in meetings, in corridor conversations, they see colleagues finding things faster and missing less.

And the question changes. Before, it was "do we have to?" After, it's "when do we get ours?" This client's own rollout plan banks on exactly that flip: department heads get trained inside their departmental channels first, on the expectation that they'll then want the same setup for their own leadership group, unprompted. That request is worth ten mandates, because the desire arrives before the training does.

This is why the sequencing matters so much. Enforcement without a showcase breeds resentment. A showcase without enforcement never gets built, because no first team ever crosses the hump by nudges alone.

Between decree and desire sits the machinery that makes both work: a champions group. This client runs one, a cross-department community of practice, and it does three jobs the project team can't do alone.

Champions nudge sideways. A colleague pinging you privately "that would've been better in the channel" lands differently from the same line in a leadership email. Peer correction is cheap, constant and kind.

Champions surface what leaders can't see. In this session alone, the group flagged which existing habits people were clinging to, which teams were quietly using outside tools, and where the resistance stories were coming from. That intelligence shapes the next round of training.

And champions are the early gardeners. They're in the channels first, posting first, praising first. Recognition matters here more than incentives: a public thank-you for the first post in a new channel costs nothing and signals everything.

One warning from the same session: make sure leadership visibly backs the champions before they start nudging. A champion who corrects a colleague without air cover feels like they're stepping out of line. A one-line endorsement from the top ("expect to be nudged, it's part of the project") turns the same act into sanctioned help.

None of this is specific to Microsoft Teams. Any workplace change that competes with an ingrained habit follows the same sequence: engineered repetition for a small group first, visible results next, pull-based spread after that.

New CRM, new task system in Planner, new meeting structure, new file locations in SharePoint. In every case the failure mode is the same: either all decree (whole-business mandate, day one, resentment and quiet reversion) or all carrot (optional adoption, endless nudging, nothing changes). The businesses that get it right run the sequence.

Decree starts adoption. Envy scales it.

If you're partway through a Microsoft 365 rollout and adoption is stalling, two options.

The [Chaos Cure](https://www.meetimeservices.com/chaos-cure) is the full self-guided playbook: channel structure, communication rules, the What Goes Where Agreement, and the rollout sequence, ready to run with your own team.

If you'd rather look at your specific situation together, [book a discovery call](https://www.meetimeservices.com/how-we-can-help).

How do you get employees to actually use Microsoft Teams?

Sequence force and desire. Pick one team, set a firm rule for a few weeks (internal collaboration in the channel, no internal email), and get them over the habit hump. Then let their visible results recruit the other teams. Whole-business mandates and purely optional adoption both fail.

Do behavioural nudges work for technology adoption?

Not at the start. Nudges tip close decisions, and at the start the old habit is far easier than the new behaviour, so nudges lose. Nudges work well later, as maintenance: peer reminders, public recognition, and visible examples keep the new habit in place once it exists.

What does a digital champions group actually do?

Three things: peer-level nudging that leadership can't do without it feeling heavy, surfacing ground-level intelligence about resistance and workarounds, and modelling the new behaviour early so there's something visible to copy. Champions need explicit, public leadership backing to do the first job comfortably.

How long should the enforcement phase of a rollout last?

Two to four weeks per team, applied narrowly (one clear rule, one team) rather than business-wide. The aim is repetition until the new way becomes the path of least resistance. Past that point, the channel's own usefulness holds the habit.

Should you roll out Microsoft Teams to the whole business at once?

No. Go team by team. The first team's working channels become the proof that makes every later team's adoption easier, and the lessons from team one improve the training for team two. A big-bang rollout gives you the hardest version of the habit problem everywhere at once.