5 Ways To Drive Office 365 Adoption

If you have an Office 365 deployment coming up soon or you have already deployed but adoption is lagging, here are some activities to drive interaction.

​1.  Start a friendly competition

• See who can build the best SharePoint page for their department.  Modern SharePoint is incredibly easy to edit and has app parts that many are unaware of: call to action buttons, count down timers, Forms, Stream, personalized content, and more.  Royalty-free images and icons can be added via web searches from within the SharePoint editing experience.  If you need to spread some inspiration, check out the SharePoint Look Book.

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2.  ​Have the students teach

• Show your users how to employ PowerPoint to record their desktop and have them create short how-to videos.  These can be on any topic, i.e., how to create an expense report, how to use time sheets, etc.  The learning here is how easy it is to use PowerPoint to accomplish something that used to require a 3rd party service, like Camtasia.
• Ask for volunteers to participate in lunch-and-learn sessions.  To keep it from being too daunting and taking too much time to prepare, ask each volunteer to demo an Office 365 application for 5-10 minutes.

3.  Encourage and reward knowledge sharing with Yammer

• Increase the ROI of your training budget - when your employees go to conferences and classes, ask them to post their learnings and insights to Yammer.
• Replace email distribution groups with Yammer groups for your Subject Matter Experts.  Allow employees to post questions for the SMEs.  The best answer can be tagged, creating a searchable knowledge base for your organization.
• Encourage employees to post relevant industry news and updates.

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4.  Make sure Leaders lead by example

• Try stepping back from email, post announcements in persistent chat locations like Teams and Yammer.
• Ditch the notepad that’s easy to lose and start using OneNote.
• Keep team and shared docs in shared locations and use modern attachments and sharing links.
• When editing and collaborating on files, use built-in versioning capabilities – Office 365 automatically captures author, modified by, modified date and file versions.  Try using @mentions in comments so others know which comments are directed at them.​

5.  Prevent sprawl & frustration

• Provide sandboxes for employees to test and play; do not let production get too big and confusing.
• Keep your content current.  News web parts are beautiful, but it must be someone’s job to post new content and take down the old.
• Use the expire feature for groups so that Teams without activity in X number of months get archived.
• Create and share the Office 365 Governance Plan.  When should new workspaces, like SharePoint Sites and Teams be created?  Who should be able to create them?  What happens when a project is complete?

Need help?  Our team of Business Readiness and Adoption specialists can help your organization drive adoption to ensure that your deployment is successful.  Contact us today to get started.

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