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What Your Microsoft Teams User Adoption Strategy Should Include

Published on November 24, 2020

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Developing an adoption strategy helps you get the most out of your Microsoft Teams (Teams) investment. With a robust adoption strategy, you put your company in good stead to achieve business goals and create your ideal user experiences for ongoing use of Teams.

What should your adoption strategy include?

Training Employees

Your change and adoption team should create a change management strategy that addresses the implementation needs of Microsoft Teams (Teams) across the organisation. Here is what it should include for a successful rollout:

 

    • Internal pilot: Since Teams deployment is multifaceted, the best approach is to run an internal pilot within your team. This would help the IT personnel to understand the platform so that they can help other employees across the organisation during the rollout.
    • Get executive support:  The adoption of Teams requires a new and different way of working. Consequently, it is preferable to appoint an executive sponsor who can help the workforce navigate complexities by communicating to the employees about the need for change, its reasons, and the challenges they may encounter during this transition.
    • Consider Teams adoption a product and not a project: Teams implementation demands both a behavioural change and a technological change; this means treating the transition process as a product and not a project. A product goes through continuous iterations in the form of new features and updates. This approach to Teams can smoothen the transition and make adoption successful.
    • Discuss use cases for Teams adoption: During the rollout process, it is better to talk about the solutions offered by the platform instead of reiterating its features. For instance, show the trainees how it can reduce collaboration issues.
    • Monitor, measure and modify as needed: Along with all the training efforts, it is imperative for the adoption team to measure, monitor, and adjust the software’s performance and acceptance among users. This is where a data-driven strategy comes into play. It is essential to get insights to evaluate the effectiveness of training sessions. You can also leverage M365 tools such as GraphAPI and other devices that deliver reporting and analytics.
    • Reporting and analytics: The reporting feature in the Teams admin centre gives you insights about how users are leveraging the platform. The report also specifically allows you to access user activity, device, and usage details. Furthermore, you can get data-driven insights on how well employees can adapt to the software and implement it in their daily operations. You can also view the usage analytics through Power BI and analyse the insights. The dashboard data is comprehensive, so you can create detailed reports and modify your strategies and decisions accordingly.

 

How to help employees with Teams integration

It would be a good idea to conduct a company-wide survey to gain insights into relevant usage metrics that help you understand how well users are adopting Teams. But that is just the start. The journey ahead involves assisting users with integrating the business processes and exploring the extensibility and efficiency gains that Teams offers.

To educate employees on how to use the integrations within Microsoft Teams, you should create a comprehensive plan to make the adoption and learning process more manageable and effective.

First, you have to integrate with Teams through bots and apps. You need to incorporate an app through integration first to make a bot. While creating an app, you can either leverage the App Studio (built-in app in Teams) or manually make the app. App Studio helps you create an app and lets you access the bot framework and register your bot.

You have many options as to where and with whom your bot integrates. You can integrate apps into channels, teams, or chats. Bots that function well in chats may not operate in channels.

Furthermore, there are several ways to share or exchange your app. You can share it with a specific channel or person, make it internally available across your organisation, or release it publicly via the Teams app store.

 

How To Train A Diverse Workforce

As with all new tools, Teams users require customised training solutions. Before you deploy Teams or execute a change to your user workflow, it is imperative to forge a comprehensive plan to educate the employees on usage and other aspects of the platform.

Define goals and strategies

Before planning things out, it is essential to outline the company-wide Microsoft Teams deployment training goals and strategies to define the purpose and objectives of the training sessions. Along with that, it is also crucial to list the optimisation techniques for introducing Teams. 

Identify timelines and milestones

Devise a data-driven strategy that will enable you to recognise and build upon positive efforts. You can abandon or revise those that have not worked well. It can help you effectively evaluate the performance of trainees as you can check it against your timelines.

Determine training channels and needs

Identify and analyse your employees’ training needs and ensure they have the resources and learning material to understand the functionality and usability of Teams. Take individual feedback from employees so that you can address their training related concerns.

Developing suitable training materials

You can make training materials accessible to the organisation’s employees to manage the deployment and transition process. This could include live webinars, video tutorials, handouts, online and in-person sessions with practice exercises.

Leverage user engagement strategies 

Such technical training often gets tedious, and the employees lose interest, so it is vital to leverage strategies that boost engagement. For example, you can adopt different training styles and approaches to see what works best for whom and how it helps them with their learning process.

Furthermore, foster on-going learning and a supportive environment across the organisation so that employees are not reluctant to ask questions and raise concerns.

 

Get started on your Teams adoption strategy

At Experteq, we understand that successful Teams deployment does not equal successful user adoption. To ensure that Teams empowers your organisation into the future, you need to focus on the value of Teams to end-users. 

We leverage Teams every day at work and wholly believe in its benefits and capabilities. To learn how Experteq can help you with User Adoption, please visit our Teams solutions page and get in touch.

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leading Australian technology solutions and services partner
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