Platform-mediated organizational communication Microsoft Teams as socio-technical infrastructure in a Kenyan NGO

1 Introduction

Digital collaboration platforms have become central to how organisations organise work, authority, and meaning, particularly in project-based settings where communication must be coordinated across time, roles, and locations (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Plantin et al., 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Platforms such as Microsoft Teams now consolidate chat, meetings, files, and workflow tools into a single environment, making them not just channels of communication but also infrastructures that shape coordination, memory, and accountability (Leonardi, 2021; Plantin and de Seta, 2019).

These shifts are especially consequential for international development organisations operating in Africa, where uneven connectivity, limited digital resources, and strong communication hierarchies can shape how collaboration platforms are actually used (Wang et al., 2021). In such contexts, platform affordances are filtered through local organisational norms, relational trust, and infrastructural constraints, yet this interaction remains underexplored in the organisational communication literature.

This article examines how Microsoft Teams functions as a socio-technical communication infrastructure in the Kenya office of a large health-focused NGO. The focal reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health department provides a critical case because it coordinates projects across dispersed teams, field sites, and donor-facing reporting structures (Amref, 2024). The study asks how staff use Teams in everyday project communication, how they assess its impact on communication and collaboration, and what frictions emerge as the platform becomes embedded in routine work.

Guided by Media Richness Theory and platformization scholarship, the article analyses how communicative clarity, immediacy, and coordination are shaped by the interaction between platform affordances, governance arrangements, and organisational conditions (Daft and Lengel, 1986; Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019; Van Dijck et al., 2018). The study contributes empirically by providing a detailed account of platform-mediated project communication in a resource-constrained NGO context, and theoretically by showing how perceived media richness emerges through practice within a platformized communication environment.

2 Literature review

2.1 Digital collaboration and the platformization turn

Recent communication scholarship shows that digital platforms have moved from supplementary tools to core organisational infrastructures that organise work and communication (Plantin et al., 2018; Poell et al., 2019). Platformization captures this shift, describing how platforms become embedded in organisational routines and shape structures, cultures, and work practices through their technical and governance logics (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Rather than serving only as channels, platforms increasingly function as environments that centralise interaction, documentation, and coordination.

Platformization scholarship conceptualises platforms as programmable architectures that regulate communication, data flows, and user interactions through design choices and institutional arrangements (Plantin et al., 2018; Poell et al., 2019; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Microsoft Teams exemplifies this dynamic by combining chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and workflow automation in a single environment that supports communication while also shaping organisational memory, accountability, and collaboration practices (Leonardi, 2021; Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2019). In this sense, collaboration platforms are not neutral intermediaries but sites where organisational communication is configured through technical design and governance.

2.2 Media richness and organisational communication effectiveness

Media Richness Theory (MRT) has long been used to explain how communication media shape information exchange in organisations, but its core assumptions were developed for a far less integrated media environment than the one now typical of platformized work. Daft and Lengel (1986) argued that richer media provide more immediate feedback, more cues, more natural language, and greater personal focus, making them better suited to equivocal tasks, while leaner media fit more routine communication (Dennis and Valacich, 1999). Dennis and Kinney (1998) later extended this logic through media synchronicity, drawing attention to how media support synchronous and asynchronous communication processes.

Yet subsequent research has shown that richness perceptions are not fixed properties of a channel and often depend on user experience, task demands, and organisational context (Carlson and Zmud, 1999; Leonardi, 2021). Integrated platforms such as Microsoft Teams complicate classical MRT assumptions because they combine text, audio, video, files, and live interaction within a single environment (Dennis et al., 2008; Kock, 2005). This has prompted broader work on media ecologies and platformized communication, which suggests that communicative effectiveness is shaped less by an isolated medium than by how users assemble modalities across a platformized communication system. In this study, MRT is therefore treated as a useful but partial lens for examining how staff in project-based NGOs experience clarity, coordination, and overload in everyday platform use.

2.3 Digital collaboration in non-Western and NGO contexts

While research on digital collaboration has expanded, most of it remains grounded in Western corporate or higher-education settings. Studies of distributed work often assume robust infrastructure, strong digital literacy, and organisational structures that support sustained technology use (Wang et al., 2021). In contrast, this article examines digital collaboration in an African NGO, where uneven connectivity, limited resources, and dispersed responsibilities shape everyday communication practices.

This case highlights how infrastructural constraints, communication norms, multilingualism, and varying degrees of trust in digital tools influence the uptake and use of collaboration technologies (Wang et al., 2021). It also shows how some voices are amplified through digital channels while others remain less visible, and how organisational communication is shaped by which channels are treated as legitimate in practice. Digital communication, in this view, is inseparable from the local organisational and regulatory environments in which it is embedded, which often differ from the contexts in which collaboration technologies are designed and researched (Plantin and de Seta, 2019).

Research on remote and distributed work further shows that employees are increasingly expected to remain continuously available across multiple channels, responding to communication demands that cross organisational boundaries (Cameron and Webster, 2020; Gregg, 2018; Leonardi, 2021). Studies of collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams have also identified benefits for coordinating work across space and time, alongside risks such as information overload, channel fragmentation, and communicative fatigue (Döring et al., 2022; Plantin and de Seta, 2019). Much of this work has focused on large technology firms in the Global North, leaving NGOs in the Global South comparatively underexamined despite their reliance on resource-constrained, donor-driven communication environments.

Emerging research on digitally mediated and hybrid work further indicates that communication effectiveness depends not only on access to tools, but also on leadership, digital literacy, and inclusion in distributed work arrangements (Kowalski and Smith, 2022).

2.4 Governance, cognitive load, and user experience

Governance is a central condition of effective platform use rather than a merely administrative concern. In Microsoft Teams, decisions about permissions, security, content management, and compliance shape whether the platform supports coordination or produces sprawl, clutter, and uneven practices that undermine its communicative value (Orchestry, 2020; TeamsFox, 2025).

This matters because governance and user experience are closely linked. When staff must track multiple channels, respond to frequent notifications, and manage parallel tasks, collaboration platforms can increase cognitive load, fragment attention, and intensify digital overload (Kirschner et al., 2011; Marsh et al., 2024; Pielot et al., 2023; Sweller, 1988; Velli, 2024). Recent work on hybrid and post-pandemic communication similarly shows that these tools can improve coordination while also creating always-on expectations and uneven communicative demands across roles (Rosa, 2022). In this study, the significance of governance lies in how it shapes the conditions under which Teams is experienced as useful, burdensome, or both.

3 Theoretical framework

3.1 Media richness in platformized organisational communication

Building on the literature reviewed above, this study applies Media Richness Theory as a lens for examining how staff in a project-based NGO evaluate Microsoft Teams as a multimodal communication environment. Rather than restating the theory in full, this section specifies how MRT is mobilised in relation to platformized organisational communication and the socio-technical conditions of project work in this case. While assessments of Media Richness, as outlined by MRT, typically focus on the individual richness of individual communication cues (text, audio, video etc.), new dimensions of richness emerge when individual communication cues are combined and sequenced within actual interaction processes on collaboration platforms. When using Microsoft Teams, for instance, users can shift between casual chat and video calls or share documents while interacting. The transition from text-based communication to video- and data-based communication significantly increases the potential of information exchange as tasks become more complex. At the same time, persistent, searchable threads and shared workspaces introduce new dimensions of richness related to continuity, visibility, and collective memory that are not fully captured in classical MRT formulations.

In this study we treat perceived media richness as an emergent property of practice rather than as a property of specific dimensions or characteristics. Rather than assuming that particular features are inherently rich or lean, it examines how project staff use Teams’ functionalities in specific communicative episodes such as clarifying instructions, negotiating timelines, or responding to crises and how they evaluate the platform's ability to reduce ambiguity and support effective collaboration under these conditions.

3.2 Platformization and socio-technical infrastructures

In MRT the focus is on the issue that one needs to do (task) and the communicative capabilities on a medium that can be put to use. While platformization scholarship draws attention to the infrastructural and governance dimensions of digital systems. Recently, however, scholars of platformization have started to argue that digital systems are not just communication features. They are also infrastructures that organise organisational life. For instance, Microsoft Teams is not only a set of communication features. It also influences organisational communication in several ways, namely: 1) through its infrastructural integration with other information systems; 2) the governance by design of different features; 3) the datafication of communication activities; and 4) the modularity of the interface design. Together, these aspects of the platform determine what kinds of communication are easy, encouraged, and possible.

At the platform level, multi-channel communication, hierarchies between channels, rules and defaults about team and channel membership, defaults about who receives notifications, and the datafication of certain forms of communicative activity can either reinforce or challenge organisational power dynamics or even open up new spaces for participation. How communication is stored centrally on the platform, such as in folders or messages, relates to how individuals are held accountable for their work and how they are evaluated in terms of their performance. Integration with other applications links communication directly to project management workflows and donor reporting requirements, further entangling platform use with organisational governance.

This paper uses a socio-technical perspective to examine how technology is transformed in practice from its design and implementation into real effects on working practices. How technology is interpreted and enacted over time by staff, working with platform features, local practices, organisational culture and infrastructural constraints such as connectivity, is of particular interest. We examine the co-production of the new communicative infrastructure for project work using Microsoft Teams, and how official attempts to standardise technology to support organisational policy and practice are contested and transformed to meet the increasingly diverse needs of users in project work.

3.3 Integrating media richness and platformization

Integrating MRT with platformization and socio-technical perspectives allows this study to capture both micro-level communicative processes and macro-level infrastructural dynamics. At the micro level, MRT directs attention to how staff deploy Teams’ modalities to handle varying degrees of task equivocality, and how they experience clarity, immediacy, and responsiveness in particular interactions. At the macro level, platformization foregrounds how Teams’ architecture and governance shape the overall ecology of communication, including the volume, distribution, and visibility of messages across the organisation.

Perceived communicative effectiveness on Microsoft Teams results from the interaction between three elements: the platform's affordances and restrictions (e.g., channel settings, notification logics, integrations), the organisational context (hierarchy, communication norms, digital infrastructure and support for digital work), and user practices (e.g., overload management, negotiation of channel use, feature appropriations for local needs). Media richness therefore cannot be conceived as a characteristic of single features, but rather as a dynamic effect resulting from their interaction within the specific ecosystem.

The research studies usage of Microsoft Teams as a platform for communicative work practices. The three research questions guide the study. The first question concerns how Teams are used for project communication and focuses on how the platform's affordances are enacted in practice. The second question pertains to the benefits of communicative richness of Teams and explores how staff experience quality of interactions in Teams. The third question addresses the frictions and the governance gaps that generate cognitive load, overload and unequal work distribution when using Teams, and finally how staff cope with these challenges. The research questions operationalize the theoretical framework in order to study how Teams is used as a communication platform in project work. The empirical insights from the study “speaks back” to existing scholarship on MRT and platformization.

3.3.1 Methods

Guided by the integrated framework of media richness and platformization, this study adopted an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to examine how Microsoft Teams shapes project communication in a large African NGO. This design allowed us to quantify patterns of platform use and perceived communicative outcomes and then interpret these patterns through staff accounts of their everyday communicative practices.

3.4 Research design and philosophical stance

The study was grounded in a pragmatic paradigm, which prioritises “what works” in addressing concrete communication problems and supports the use of multiple methods to capture complex socio-technical phenomena. The pragmatic paradigm is more concerned with how different methods and methodological approaches, or combinations of these, can be used to map and explore a complex socio-technical phenomenon. The key features of knowledge generated within such a paradigm include its temporal, provisional and contextual nature. Essentially the outcome of the knowledge generation process is the practical outcome it delivers, and this is a product of the synthesis of quantitative data with the qualitative insights that individuals attribute to the same phenomena. The study investigates in detail the differing ways in which a collaboration platform is used as a medium and as an infra-structural force that influences collaboration practice.

This study was conducted using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach. A structured questionnaire collected quantitative data on participants’ Microsoft Teams usage, perceived communication quality, coordination and collaboration. The questionnaire results were then used to select a subset of participants to engage in in-depth interviews. The qualitative data were used to gain insights into media–task alignment, overload and governance. Methodological integration took place at the integration at the design stage, the sampling stage and the interpretation stage. Joint displays were used to present the findings from both phases to enhance the overall understanding of the findings generated by the study.

3.5 Organisational context and participants

This research was conducted in the Kenya office of a large health-oriented NGO. The department of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health (RMNCAH) projects represent the largest share of the country office's overall projects. Microsoft Teams is employed throughout the department for coordination and communication among the department's staff, including senior project managers, programme officers, technical specialists, and front-line health workers. These team members are spread across the country office in the capital city of Kenya and at project sites dispersed around the country.

The department under study used Microsoft Teams for several purposes, ranging from intense interaction between urban-based staff utilising organisation-owned tools to facilitate communication, to occasional use by those in field-based roles with intermittent internet access on handheld devices. Therefore, the department offered an interesting site to examine how the affordances of the technology influenced to varying degrees the interactions with organisation structures and staff practices to yield specific communication outcomes.

3.6 Phase 1: quantitative questionnaire

3.6.1 Instrument and measures

A structured questionnaire assessed frequency and modes of Microsoft Teams use, perceived communication quality, collaboration effectiveness, and challenges associated with platform-mediated project work. The instrument included multi-item measures of communication clarity and collaboration effectiveness, alongside single-item indicators of usability, satisfaction, recommendation, formal training, and difficulties encountered. Communication clarity was measured with six items covering timely communication, message clarity, ease of finding information, timeliness of responses, prevention of misunderstandings, and fit between communication modes and project needs; collaboration effectiveness was measured with five items assessing task coordination, real-time document collaboration, knowledge sharing, responsiveness, and progress tracking. Agreement items used five-point Likert scales (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree), while satisfaction and recommendation items used comparable five-point evaluative scales. The questionnaire was informed by Media Richness Theory, platformization literature, and prior work on digital collaboration and virtual teamwork, with content validity strengthened through expert review and pre-testing. Items were adapted from validated instruments assessing media richness and digital communication and collaboration at work (e.g., Carlson and Zmud, 1999; Oberländer and Bipp, 2022) and modified for the NGO context; full item wording is available upon request.

3.6.2 Sampling and data collection

The target population for the survey comprised all staff in the focal department who used Microsoft Teams for project-related communication and collaboration. Eligibility criteria were: (1) staff involved in project management and/or team membership; (2) regular use of Microsoft Teams for project work; (3) at least six months of experience using Microsoft Teams for project work; and (4) current engagement in active projects. Staff who rarely used Microsoft Teams for project work or had little or no experience with the platform were excluded. Of the 50 eligible departmental staff, 49 completed the questionnaire (response rate 98%), all of whom had used Microsoft Teams for project work for more than one year. The questionnaire was distributed electronically, with invitations sent via WhatsApp to encourage participation from staff with heavy workloads. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. The resulting dataset provided near-comprehensive coverage of eligible staff in the department and enabled analysis across a range of roles.

3.6.3 Analysis

Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including means, frequencies, and percentages, together with exploratory inferential analyses. Table 1 reports the descriptive statistics and internal consistency estimates for the multi-item constructs, including communication clarity and collaboration effectiveness, while Tables 2, 3 present the bivariate correlations and group comparisons, respectively. Cronbach's alpha was used to assess the reliability of the multi-item scales, and Pearson correlations were calculated to examine associations among communication clarity, collaboration effectiveness, satisfaction, formal training, difficulties encountered, and the number of reported challenges. Independent-samples t-tests were used to compare respondents who had received formal Teams training with those who had not, with effect sizes reported to indicate the magnitude of observed differences. The quantitative results also informed the qualitative phase by identifying patterns of use, variation in perceived effectiveness, and areas of friction that warranted further exploration in the interview sample.

Table 1. Descriptive statistics and reliability.

Table 2. Selected correlations among main constructs.

Table 3. Group comparisons by formal teams training.

3.7 Phase 2: qualitative interviews

3.7.1 Sampling and participants

After the preliminary survey analysis, a purposive subsample of participants were invited for semi-structured interviews in order to delve deeper into the data and gather more detailed explanations of practices within organisations. The sample of interview participants varied in organisational role (project manager, team leader, project officer) and their experiences with Microsoft Teams (perceived high and moderate benefits, or overload). Participants were selected if they met the same criteria for the survey but, in addition, reported frequent use of Microsoft Teams and willingness to discuss in detail practices and challenges for effective communicative use within their organisations.

We adopt a stratified sampling strategy to ensure that our interview corpus captures a range of perspectives on platform-mediated communication. Drawing on these data, we present an analysis of the qualitative sample that yields sufficient diversity to explore how staff's experiences of Teams are shaped by their organisational position, the infrastructural conditions in which they use the platform, and their digital literacy.

In total, 16 staff participated in semi-structured interviews, including 4 senior project managers, 6 project or programme officers, 3 technical specialists, and 3 front-line health workers located in both the Nairobi country office and field-based project sites. We monitored thematic redundancy throughout analysis and judged that saturation had been reached by interview 14, as subsequent interviews did not yield new codes or themes beyond those already identified (Guest et al., 2006; Morse, 2000).

3.7.2 Data collection

The semi-structured staff interviews built upon the theoretical framework and findings from the questionnaire. Interview questions sort to understand: How staff used different Microsoft Teams features within their projects; Decisions around channel choice and use of different platforms to support project communication; Perceptions of clarity, coordination and responsiveness; Managing overload, fragmentation or governance/governance breaches when using Teams. Probes were used to provide more detail and illustrate points through storytelling based on the staff member's recent experiences (e.g., recent project issues, tasks that required complex coordination, barriers or constraints to effective communication).

The interviews were held mostly via Microsoft Teams, with some adjustments made, such as switching to audio-only or interviews being scheduled at alternative times, due to connectivity or workload reasons. The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and the participants consented to the recording. During the interviews field notes were written and initial analytic notes made.

3.7.3 Analysis

The qualitative data were analysed using thematic analysis. The transcripts were read through iteratively to identify themes related to media–task alignment, platform affordances and constraints, governance practices influencing communication through Microsoft Teams, cognitive load generated during communication using Microsoft Teams and the organisational culture which facilitated or restricted communication through Microsoft Teams. An initial coding scheme was devised from the theoretical framework and the research questions, which was then refined inductively as more transcripts were read through and new themes were identified.

Coding combined deductive and inductive approaches. Deductive codes were derived from Media Richness Theory, platformization, and the socio-technical framework (e.g., media–task alignment, affordances, governance, overload), while inductive codes captured recurring patterns and meanings emerging from participants’ accounts beyond the initial framework. All transcripts were coded by the author, who is familiar with the organisational context but not employed by the NGO, and potential bias was mitigated through iterative memoing, and comparison with survey patterns to challenge early interpretations. Coding was conducted manually using structured matrices in Excel/Word rather than specialist software, with steps including familiarisation, line-by-line initial coding, grouping related codes into candidate themes, and refining themes in relation to the research questions and the integrated theoretical framework. Themes were reviewed against the full dataset to ensure that they captured both convergent and divergent experiences across roles and locations, and summary matrices were produced to link codes, illustrative quotations, and corresponding survey findings.

To enhance trustworthiness, I drew on Lincoln and Guba's criteria of credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Credibility was supported through triangulation between survey results and interview themes, peer debriefing among the research team, and careful attention to negative cases that did not fit dominant patterns. Dependability was promoted by maintaining an audit trail of coding decisions, analytic memos, and evolving theme definitions. Confirmability was addressed through reflexive memoing on the researchers’ positionality and assumptions, and by grounding interpretations in multiple, convergent data excerpts rather than single quotations. Transferability was facilitated by providing thick description of the organisational context, department structure, and participant roles, allowing readers to judge the applicability of findings to other NGOs and Global South organisational settings.

3.8 Integration and ethics

Integration was achieved through joint displays and summary matrices that linked key survey patterns with interview themes and supported the development of meta-inferences. Survey results informed purposive interview sampling and interview guide refinement, while the qualitative findings helped explain observed patterns in communication clarity, collaboration, training, and overload. In this way, quantitative indicators such as clarity and challenge scores were interpreted alongside staff accounts of how Teams was used in everyday project communication, yielding a more integrated account of platform-mediated work than either strand could provide alone.

Ethical approval for the study was obtained through the relevant institutional review processes. Participants were informed about the purpose of the study, the voluntary nature of their participation, and their right to decline or withdraw without consequence, and informed consent was obtained before data collection. Data were anonymised in reporting, and fieldwork was scheduled to minimise disruption to staff workloads. No biological samples or genetic information were collected.

This explanatory sequential design allowed the study to examine Microsoft Teams both as a communication tool and as part of the organisation's socio-technical system. The survey provided a broad picture of use and perceived communication outcomes, while the interviews added context on how staff enacted, negotiated, and sometimes worked around the platform in practice. Together, the two strands support a nuanced understanding of how platform affordances, organisational norms, and infrastructure conditions shape internal communication in the case organisation.

4 Findings

The findings are organised around the three research questions and presented in four subsections. First, I provide a quantitative overview of platform use and perceptions (Section 4.1), followed by more detailed accounts of how staff use Microsoft Teams in project communication (Section 4.2). Next, I examine perceived communicative benefits (Section 4.3), and finally I discuss frictions, overload, and governance gaps (Section 4.4). Quantitative survey results offer an overall picture of usage patterns and perceived outcomes, while qualitative interviews illustrate how staff enact and interpret platform-mediated communication in their everyday project work (Table 4).

Table 4. Survey participant characteristics (N = 49).

4.1 Quantitative overview of platform use and perceptions

4.1.1 Descriptive statistics and reliability

Internal consistency was assessed for the multi-item constructs using Cronbach's alpha. Communication clarity showed good reliability (α=.85), while collaboration effectiveness showed moderate reliability (α=.57). Descriptive statistics indicated generally positive evaluations of Microsoft Teams. Communication clarity was rated relatively highly (M = 3.64, SD = 0.33), and collaboration effectiveness was also rated positively (M = 3.59, SD = 0.39). Satisfaction with Teams was above the scale midpoint (M = 3.76, SD = 0.85), and respondents were highly likely to recommend the platform for project management use (M = 4.73, SD = 0.76). Reported difficulties were comparatively limited overall (M = 0.31, SD = 0.47), although the distribution of challenge counts suggests that some respondents experienced notable frictions.

4.1.2 Inferential analyses

Bivariate analyses showed that communication clarity and collaboration effectiveness were strongly positively correlated (r = .89, p < .001), indicating that respondents who perceived Teams as clearer for communication also tended to rate it as more effective for collaboration. Collaboration effectiveness was also positively associated with satisfaction (r = .31, p = .035), while formal training was positively associated with communication clarity (r = .35, p = .019), collaboration effectiveness (r = .33, p = .025), and satisfaction (r = .39, p = .006). Training was negatively associated with difficulties encountered (r = -.29, p = .041) and number of reported challenges (r = -.28, p = .048), suggesting that respondents who had received formal training tended to report fewer platform-related problems. Recommendation scores were negatively associated with difficulties (r = -.30, p = .039), indicating that more problematic user experiences reduced enthusiasm for recommending Teams.

To improve readability, the main descriptive survey results on platform usage are summarised in Table 5 rather than embedded entirely in narrative form.

Table 5. Usage frequencies of microsoft teams features.

Table 6 summarises respondents’ perceptions of the main communicative benefits and challenges associated with Teams use in project work.

Table 6. Perceived benefits and challenges of microsoft teams.

These results indicate that respondents who had received formal Teams training generally reported more positive communication and collaboration experiences and fewer platform-related difficulties. Because the trained subgroup is small, these comparisons should be interpreted cautiously, but they nevertheless provide clearer statistical support for the practical importance of role-sensitive training than the current draft offers.

4.1.3 integration between survey and interview findings

To make the integration between the survey and interview findings explicit, Table 7 presents a concise joint display of the four strongest patterns across both strands. The table links key quantitative results with the qualitative explanations that help account for them and summarises the meta-inferences drawn from their convergence. Together, these patterns show that Teams was experienced not simply as a communication tool, but as a socio-technical infrastructure whose value depended on how staff combined modalities, navigated governance, and worked within infrastructural constraints.

Table 7. Joint display of quantitative and qualitative findings.

Taken together, these integrated patterns indicate that Microsoft Teams was valued not simply for its technical features, but for the way staff enacted it within their communication routines. The survey results provide the broad pattern, while the interview accounts clarify why those patterns emerged and where the platform's benefits were constrained by governance, workload, and infrastructure. These meta-inferences inform the Discussion, which interprets the findings through Media Richness Theory and platformization to show how communicative effectiveness is produced in practice.

4.2 Uses of Microsoft Teams in project communication

The results of the survey showed that Microsoft Teams had become a vital part of the department's way of communicating about projects. Everyone who answered the survey said they had been using the platform for work for over a year, and nearly 70% of them used it many times a day. The rest, about 30%, used it several times a week. These patterns indicate that Teams was deeply embedded in everyday project communication rather than used only occasionally. In fact, Teams has become a central tool for them to communicate with each other about their work, rather than just something they use occasionally.

People who use Teams said they use many of its features a lot. Every single person used audio and video calls, and almost everyone used chat or instant messaging. A lot of people also used the planner or tasks app, and file sharing, with 88% of people using these features. Channel discussions were also popular, with 75% of people using them. Some people even used third-party integrations like Trello or Jira, with 63% of people using these. Many respondents emphasised the value of audio and video calls for complex coordination, describing these modalities as “the fastest way to sort out confusion” when tasks were highly interdependent. (Team Leader). 57% of people said these calls were very important for their work. This shows how important it is to have good, real-time communication when working on complicated tasks. But even though people use Teams a lot, only 14% of them got formal training on how to use it. This means that most people learned how to use Teams by figuring it out themselves or by asking their colleagues for help.

When we looked at the interview data, it became clear how the different tools were used in project communication. The people we talked to said they used certain channels to give regular project updates and keep documents in order. They used chat for quick questions and to coordinate things on the fly. And they used video calls for discussions that needed a bit more finesse, like negotiating or looking over documents together. Teams was like a central hub where project managers and staff could keep track of conversations, assign tasks, and see how decisions were made over time. As one project manager at the country office explained, “Teams is where we keep the story of the project – the channels show the history of decisions and documents, so it's easier to follow what has happened.” (Project Manager) A field-based officer similarly noted, “Chat is what we use when we need quick answers; if things get complicated, we move to a call and share the document on the screen.” (Project Staff). But at the same time, staff often had to juggle multiple tools and platforms - switching between Teams, email, and other messaging apps depending on their connection, what device they were using, and how formal the message needed to be.

4.3 Perceived communicative benefits

Overall, respondents viewed Microsoft Teams as enhancing key dimensions of project communication effectiveness. The positive ratings for clarity and timeliness suggest that Teams supported routine coordination effectively, but the interview data show that these benefits depended on users’ ability to move flexibly across modalities and on the existence of workable local communication norms. Respondents generally perceived Teams as supporting effective collaboration across several dimensions, including coordination, shared document work, and knowledge sharing. A big group of them, 84%, said it helped team members organise tasks and work together better. And 75% liked that they could all work on documents at the same time, which made it easier to finish reports and other projects. Many people, 75%, also thought that Teams was great for sharing knowledge and solving problems together. Some, 61%, felt that it made their team more responsive and engaged, and 57% said it helped them keep track of how their project was going. All of these things together show that people didn't just use Teams to send messages, but as a way to really work together and be accountable to each other. They could see what everyone was doing, work together, and make sure everything got done.

Interview accounts echoed these quantitative patterns. One project staff observed, “When instructions come through Teams, we can go back and check the thread; it reduces the chances of misinterpreting what was agreed.” (Project staff) Another participant commented, “Before Teams, we missed updates because they were scattered in emails – now most things are visible in one place, so it's easier to keep the team aligned.” (Team Leader).

4.4 Frictions, overload, and governance gaps

Despite the positive comments noted above, there were some issues that prevented people making fuller use of Microsoft Teams. Only 25% of respondents reported some problems with using Teams, but the issues they did experience stemmed from a complex/confusing user interface, limited integration with other project management tools (such as Trello, Asana and Basecamp), connectivity problems and limited options for customising the tool to a project's specific needs. It was interesting to note that those who had received formal training experienced fewer problems, but the association was just short of significance.

Teams experienced a number of issues as a result of this practice. Team members reported feeling overloaded as they were added to multiple channels/groups without a clear reason for doing so. Several participants described feeling overwhelmed by the volume of notifications and fragmented channels. One respondent remarked, “Sometimes it feels like I’m drowning in messages; I worry I’ll miss something important because there is too much happening at once.” (Project Staff) A respondent noted, “We have so many teams and channels that you don't always know where to post; you end up checking several places before you can be sure you haven't missed a request.” (Project Staff) Literature on technostress and digital overload has shown that individuals experience significant cognitive strain as they operate in a hyper connected environment. For the organisation's field-based employees, intermittent connectivity compounded the problems. Instead of a steady stream of messages and notifications, they experienced large pulses of communication and found it difficult to process messages in a timely manner.

A second set of challenges revolved around governance and support for adoption. As one manager put it, “Without clear rules about who creates channels and how they should be named, people do their own thing, and the workspace becomes cluttered.” (Project Manager). While MS Teams had high levels of adoption across the organisation, there were few formal rules around things like channel creation, membership to teams and general use of the space. Additionally, there was little organisational support for setting up notifications correctly and enabling integration with other tools and systems. While these workarounds helped individual users manage immediate demands, they sometimes undermined the intended centralisation and transparency of communication on the platform.

Taken together, the findings depict Microsoft Teams as a socio-technical infrastructure that both enables and constrains project communication. Its multimodal capabilities and shared workspaces support richer, more coordinated communication, but they also introduce new burdens related to overload, navigation, and governance. These dynamics set the stage for the discussion that follows, which interprets the findings through the integrated lens of media richness and platformization and considers implications for organisational communication in NGOs (Figure 1).

5 Discussion

The integrated findings show that the quantitative patterns reported in the survey are best understood in light of the qualitative accounts summarised in Table 5. Survey responses indicated generally positive perceptions of communication clarity, collaboration effectiveness, and satisfaction with Microsoft Teams, yet the interviews reveal that these outcomes were not produced by the platform alone. Rather, they emerged through specific communicative practices such as escalating from chat to calls, maintaining visibility through channels, and coordinating work through shared documents that enabled staff to align media use with task demands. At the same time, the interviews help explain why overload and difficulties appeared only moderate in the survey: these burdens were concentrated among particular users, especially those navigating multiple channels, weak governance, limited training and intermittent connectivity. Taken together, the two strands suggest that the communicative value of Teams in this NGO depended less on technical features in the abstract than on the interaction between platform affordances, governance arrangements, user capabilities and infrastructural conditions.

In interpreting these results, it is important to distinguish between empirical findings, conceptual implications, and more speculative theoretical extensions. Empirically, the study documents how staff in one project-based department of a Kenyan NGO use Microsoft Teams to organise communication and collaboration, and how they experience both benefits and frictions in this specific setting. Conceptually, the findings refine existing perspectives by illustrating how Media Richness Theory and platformization can be applied to integrated, socio-technical environments where richness emerges from multimodal practices and governance arrangements, rather than from isolated channels alone. More speculative theoretical propositions, such as the idea of media richness as an emergent socio-technical property of platform ecologies should be understood as contextually grounded insights from this single case, and as suggestions for further research rather than definitive, universally generalisable redefinitions of MRT.

5.1 Theoretical contribution to organisational communication

This study advances organisational communication by showing how Media Richness Theory operates within platformised, socio-technical environments rather than treating it as a major re-theorization. In a multimodal collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams, perceived media richness appears as an emergent outcome of everyday communicative practice, not a fixed property of isolated channels. Staff assemble “rich” communication by flexibly combining chat, channels, audio/video calls, and shared documents within a single space, aligning these configurations with task equivocality and local work constraints.

The findings also demonstrate that platform affordances, governance arrangements, and infrastructural conditions jointly shape these assessments of richness and effectiveness. Channel structures and notification defaults configure visibility and responsiveness; formal and informal governance practices allocate communicative responsibilities and legitimate channels; and infrastructural constraints related to bandwidth and devices narrow what forms of communication are realistically available. Viewed together, collaboration platforms function as internal communication infrastructures that mediate clarity, coordination, and cognitive load in project-based NGOs. The socio-technical framework developed here clarifies how classic MRT concepts travel into integrated platform environments and illuminates how platform governance and infrastructural inequality structure the communicative conditions under which project work is organised in Global South NGOs.

5.2 Implications for organisational communication in NGOs

For NGOs operating in complex, resource-constrained environments, our findings show that collaboration platforms are not merely communication tools but core internal communication infrastructures that require deliberate design, governance, and support. When widely adopted and used consistently, platforms like Microsoft Teams can enhance clarity, coordination, and collaborative problem-solving in project work. At the same time, the benefits remain fragile: frictions related to overload, interface complexity, integration gaps, and uneven training indicate that outcomes depend heavily on organisational choices around how the platform is configured and managed.

First, the results underscore the importance of explicit communication governance. Unchecked channel proliferation, unclear membership rules, and ad hoc notification practices contributed to fragmentation and cognitive overload, prompting staff to rely on personal workarounds that undermined centralization and transparency. NGO leaders and communication managers therefore need to develop and sustain shared norms for channel creation and naming, membership, use of @mentions, expectations for responsiveness, and integration with other communication tools, alongside guidance on configuring notifications.

Second, the study highlights the centrality of capacity building and role-sensitive support. Formal training was rare but associated with fewer reported difficulties, while many staff depended on informal peer learning to navigate a complex platform ecosystem. In organisations with diverse roles and uneven infrastructure, tailored training that responds to specific communicative demands (for example, field-based staff with intermittent connectivity versus headquarters-based managers) can help mitigate technostress, reduce overload, and support more equitable participation.

Third, the NGO context foregrounds questions of inclusion and power in platform-mediated communication. Increased visibility and datafication can strengthen accountability and coordination but may also intensify surveillance, reinforce existing hierarchies, or marginalise staff with weaker digital access or skills. Communication leaders should therefore approach collaboration platforms as spaces where organisational culture and power relations are negotiated, involving staff in decisions about governance, training, and acceptable use. Finally, treating digital communication as an ongoing socio-technical change process, rather than a one-off deployment, can help NGOs ensure that collaboration platforms support, rather than strain, organisational communication in project work, and invites further research on platformized media environments in Global South NGOs.

5.3 Extending media richness in platformised environments

Media Richness Theory remains useful for studying internal communication on collaboration platforms, but in platformised organisations it operates differently. Staff in this NGO rely on Teams’ richer modalities, especially audio and video calls and real-time document co-editing, to handle ambiguous, urgent, or interdependent tasks. At the same time, they use chats, channels, and shared files for routine coordination and documentation. In this specific Global South NGO context, media richness is enacted as an emergent socio-technical property within a single platform. These patterns suggest that media richness is not a fixed attribute of separate tools but an emergent socio-technical property of how users sequence and layer modalities within one platformized system. Rather than choosing between distinct media, staff move along a continuum from text to audio and video within Teams to manage task complexity and time constraints. This dynamic “media choreography” extends MRT by emphasizing practices of escalation and combination enabled by integrated platform architectures. At the same time, the study reveals costs not fully captured in classical MRT. Increased multimodality can enhance clarity and coordination, but it also amplifies information overload, notification fatigue, and cognitive demands. These burdens erode some communicative gains in resource-constrained NGOs, underscoring that media richness is context dependent and shaped by platform affordances, organisational conditions, user strategies, and infrastructural constraints.

6 Conclusion

This study examined how a digital collaboration platform shapes internal communication and collaboration in project teams within a large African NGO by integrating Media Richness Theory with socio-technical and platformization perspectives. It showed, through an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, that Microsoft Teams has become a central internal communication infrastructure in the focal department, enabling frequent, multimodal interaction and shared work across roles and locations. Staff reported improvements in communicative clarity, timeliness, and task coordination, particularly when they could flexibly combine audio/video calls, chat, channels, and real-time document co-authoring for complex project tasks.

At the same time, the findings underscored that these benefits are contingent on platform governance and organisational conditions. Interface complexity, integration gaps, and notification overload were especially pronounced where governance was ambiguous and formal training limited and were intensified by connectivity constraints and uneven digital literacy. Collaboration platforms therefore do not guarantee communicative effectiveness on their own; their value depends on how organisational governance, capacity-building, and culture interact with platform affordances and infrastructural limits.

From an organisational communication perspective, the study demonstrates how digital collaboration platforms now function as core infrastructures through which clarity, coordination, accountability, and communicative labour are organised in project-based NGOs. It refines Media Richness Theory for platformised contexts by showing that perceived richness is an emergent, socio-technical property of how users’ sequence and layer modalities within an integrated platform under specific organisational and infrastructural conditions. It also empirically anchors platformization theory in a Global South NGO, highlighting how architectures, integration capacities, and governance arrangements shape everyday communicative practice and technostress. Practically, the results suggest that NGOs should treat digital communication as an ongoing socio-technical change process, investing in role-sensitive training, user-centred governance of channels and notifications, and context-aware support that acknowledges infrastructural constraints and internal diversity.

This study is limited by its focus on a single department within one large health-focused NGO in Kenya and by its reliance on self-reported survey and interview data. As such, the findings are shaped by organisational specificity and contextual conditions, including project-based structures, donor-driven workflows, and global South infrastructural constraints such as intermittent connectivity and uneven access to devices. The insights are likely to be transferable to other NGOs and development organisations that rely on platform-mediated internal communication in similar resource-constrained, project-oriented environments, but they should be adapted cautiously to organisations with different governance regimes, cultures or infrastructure. Future research could build on this case by undertaking comparative studies across NGOs, sectors or countries, and by using longitudinal designs to trace how platform-mediated communication practices and socio-technical arrangements evolve over time, thereby testing and refining the propositions advanced here about emergent media richness, platform governance and cognitive load in platformised organisational communication.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. Generative AI was used to assist with language editing and restructuring of sections, including the abstract, discussion, and conclusion, while all ideas, interpretations, data analyses, and substantive arguments were conceived, verified, and finalized by the author, who takes full responsibility for the content of this manuscript.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: Muhammad Asim Nawaz, Government College University, Faisalabad, Pakistan

Reviewed by: Hamad Raza, Government College University, Faisalabad, Pakistan

Abdul Kholik, Jakarta State University, Indonesia