Microsoft Teams ruined my life
Over the last two weeks, my lab group have hosted two invited speakers remotely. Both were experienced academics and completely comfortable with video conferencing. And yet, both spent the first five minutes of their talk clicking around, sighing, and saying, “Sorry, I just need to figure out how to share my screen.”
The problem? They were on Microsoft Teams.
We use Teams because our university only provides Zoom licences to a limited number of people each year by request.
Meanwhile, Teams remains the default. A platform where:
Messages pile up from students who have also emailed you.
The file storage system shifts under your feet. (OneDrive? SharePoint? Who knows.)
Sharing documents is oddly unpredictable—sometimes seamless, sometimes met with an unhelpful error message that makes no sense.
Breakout rooms don’t always work properly.
And anyone can message you at any time, which means one more place to be reachable.
Teams is what happens when universities pick a tool based on what’s best for admin structures, not what actually works for research and teaching. The tail is wagging the dog.
The constant availability problem
This isn’t just about usability—it’s part of a bigger shift in how universities operate.
The logic behind Teams isn’t “What’s the best platform for research collaboration?” It’s, “What lets Professional Services staff communicate and share documents easily?”
This is bad for everyone, but paradoxically, especially for admin staff, who don’t have the same level of control over their time as academics do.
When messaging is always ‘on’ and work happens in 50 different overlapping group chats, people feel pressured to constantly be available—to answer instantly, to be in meetings all day, to always be ‘green’ on the system.
And it’s not just staff. When universities make Teams their standard communication tool, it pushes this ‘always available’ culture onto academics too. It’s one more inbox, one more pile of unread messages, and one more demand for your attention.
The real cost isn’t money—it’s time and focus
Universities think they’re saving money by making Teams the default. But the real cost isn’t financial—it’s in how much harder it makes everything.
It’s extra minutes spent finding a document.
It’s unnecessary messages you wouldn’t have received otherwise.
It’s lost focus from juggling one more system.
Case in point: I used ChatGPT’s frighteningly impressive o1 model to do a back of the fag packet calculation on the “cost savings” of Teams versus Zoom. It suggested that, for around 1,800 academics, giving each one a Zoom licence might cost about £270,000 a year—while if we assume just 10 minutes wasted on Teams every day per academic, then we’re getting close to £3 million*. Even if those numbers are approximate, they paint a clear picture: “free” can be extremely expensive when you measure cost in staff time and brainpower.
This is why I am a fan of single-use technologies where possible—the idea that good tools should do one thing well. There are some exceptions to this that I make, like the iPhone, for example, but by and large, I want a master, not a jack of all trades.
Zoom is for video conferencing. It’s clean and simple, and it works.
Teams tries to be everything at once, which means it does none of it well.
Finding ways to make it work
If you’re stuck with Teams, the best approach is to use it as little as possible—or at least set boundaries around when you’re available.
Personally, I use Zoom for anything I can. I am one of the lucky few with a university-approved licence that I use for my writing groups (where Teams would be a fucking disaster). It’s technically for “Mac compatibility” (even though that particular issue is from 2020, but they don’t ask questions when I put the request in). This is because Zoom is only provided for student-facing activities and was rejected when I asked for it for the writing group, which says a lot about where priorities lie.
For everything else? I try to keep Teams to a minimum— meetings only. Because the less attention I give it, the more attention I have for the work that actually matters.
*Assuming a university has 1,800 academic staff, providing each with a Zoom licence (~£150 per year) would cost ~£270,000 annually. In contrast, if each academic loses just 10 minutes per workday due to inefficiencies in Teams, this adds up to ~33 hours per year, per person. At an estimated £50 per hour (factoring in salary, pension, NI and employer costs), the total cost in wasted time exceeds £2.9 million annually—more than ten times the cost of Zoom.
