Adding “Chat with me on Teams” to your e-mail sig

I recently delivered a very detailed release note about a cool new piece of an intranet to a senior HR leader at a client. His response was, paraphrased, “This is great and interesting, and I’ll read it, but can you tell me how you added this line to your e-mail signature?”

[This was the line in my sig that he liked]

It’s simple to do:

1. Go into “Signatures” in Outlook from an open e-mail message to edit them
2. Pick the signature you want to edit

[Editing a signature in Outlook]

3. Add the text “Chat with me on Teams” to the signature

4. Add a link to “Chat with me on Teams” by highlighting the phrase and hitting [ctrl-k] (one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts) to add the following link: http://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=mike.gilronan@sympraxisconsulting.com (change the e-mail to your email address, of course)

5. If you’d like to embellish it with an icon, you can search for, download, and re-size (I used 40x25px) any chat icon you like, and add that to the beginning of the line.

[The finished product]

Et voila! You’ve now given e-mail recipients a gentle nudge (and a one-click method) toward engaging with you via Teams instead of e-mail. This is no substitute for good norms (shout-out to Matt Wade for his excellent guidance on this topic) within teams and organizations about communications methods, tools and boundaries, but it’s one way to help colleagues easily engage with you using your preferred method, especially in organizations where Team adoption is catching fire.