Discover how your people are collaborating in the cloud

With the increase in global organisations moving to Windows 10, Office 365, cloud based communication and new team collaboration tools, employees are facing major changes in the way they work.

Whilst many of these changes are vital for the digital workplace journey, organisations are struggling to create ‘people readiness’ – now and for a future of change. It’s a major concern for the customers I talk to, such as a leading insurance company we’re supporting who wanted to streamline their communication tools and move all their services to the cloud.

A quick look at the support sections of any collaboration service provider’s website, not to mention Google or YouTube, reveals plenty of free user guides and how to deploy guides. Are these enough to drive behaviour change?

It’s becoming a common perception that emailing users to notify them and providing an online user guide is sufficient to drive the change needed. But standard user guides aren’t enough because, with cloud based solutions, there are many ways of using the tools. Each roll-out I work on can be very different, depending on the transformation journey the organisation is taking. Not all of the products or features might be relevant and, when a user guide can be around 150 pages, that’s a lot of content to review and make relevant to your users.

For collaboration projects to truly succeed, a user behaviour transformation is needed with a change management programme. For example, one organisation I worked with had failed to drive a move away from desk-phone to using computer headsets. When we looked into why users hadn’t adopted the new technology, it was as simple as they didn’t know where to order the headsets from.

On another recent project, a conferencing deployment failed despite plenty of user guides, training and communication. It failed for a more fundamental reason - that there had been no discovery stage to the project.

Discovery helps you understand your starting point - your employees’ current behaviour, the tools they are using, how, when and why they are using them, what they like and dislike. You can then assess and identify the behaviour change needed with the new solution. This gap analysis is key in helping you position the changes correctly across your workforce and to build a user adoption programme based on the level and type of behaviour change required - making it relevant for the users.

In the example above, despite plenty of user adoption support, the project failed because the team didn’t realise that most people joined conference calls from their cars, and they had problems using the app to join from their company mobiles over Bluetooth. So no one used the new service.

Discovery is something we’re putting more and more emphasis on in our user adoption methodology. We’ve found that 60 per cent of user behaviours within an organisation are consistent, and then we develop a number of personas to help us define the behaviour changes needed across groups such as PAs, administrators, mobile workforce and desk-based teams.

The user adoption programme then becomes an internal marketing programme - generating awareness beyond using email, interest, guiding and educating the users to ensure they have everything they need to get started and responding to live feedback and questions.

We can assess your environment, audience and what you want the technology to deliver in order to help you build and execute a tailored adoption plan for your organisation.

Watch our webinar to find out more.