How to increase Microsoft 365 user adoption

Introduction

Many businesses are investing in Microsoft 365 to facilitate modern collaboration for improved productivity. Microsoft 365 brings rich set of tools for IT experts and end users to make their lives easier. However, no matter how useful the new technology is, users are not always comfortable with changes introduced in their workplace. Correspondingly, to witness Microsoft 365 benefits in an organization, it’s imperative for users to actively engage in the platform.

In this blog, we will learn about effective strategies to increase end-user adoption for successful deployment of Microsoft 365. Let’s begin –

1. Train end-users

Training is critical to ensure that end users have necessary knowledge and information about Microsoft 365 value and effectiveness. First of all, users must know why the change is happening at workplace followed by the productive use of tools. Additionally, you must convey how new technology is going to influence each individual as well as team as a whole. It is best to provide use cases that identify common business challenges with possible solutions. Remember, Microsoft 365 offers plenty of apps and ways to perform the same tasks. Depending on your organizational purpose, you must educate users about which tools to use when to avoid confusions and chaos.

2. Activate self-service

Some organizations believe that giving too much freedom to end users results in unnecessary proliferation of groups in M365 ecosystem. While they choose to turn off self-service features, we don’t recommend user restriction to bring platform under control. Thereby, disabling users to explore the tool takes away a lot of value Microsoft 365 provides and deters adoption eventually. To get intended outcomes from M365, it is important to allow flexibility to users to utilize services to the fullest. Indeed, you can also trade-off between M365 management and user empowerment by doubling down on governance.

3. Implement governance

Microsoft 365 applications such as Teams may generate a great upheaval due to uncontrolled adoption. If self-service is enabled, users may end up creating many teams with duplicate names, or without a purpose. An overgrowth of teams intertwines associated workspaces that leads to poor search experience, user frustration and administration challenges. Nevertheless, by enforcing governance policies, you can eliminate potential security risks related to data loss that arise shortly after deployment.

Governance keeps Teams ecosystem in order and ensures a consistent structure to Teams by managing lifecycle of teams. However, governance is a ton of work for admins. Managing each team individually and manually in a large-sized organization is always tedious and time consuming. To overcome this, you can use our product TeamsHub.io to automate Microsoft 365 governance and simplify administration. To learn more about governance using TeamsHub.io, please click here.

4. Enhance employee engagement

High employee engagement is key to driving and maximizing adoption. As engagement and adoption are symbiotic activities, it is wise to elevate team experience using various engagement features. Microsoft 365 powers employee engagement using Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, and other tools. Advanced engagement features incorporated in these tools empower users to connect with their organizations and align them to common goals.

You can rely on Microsoft Teams to hold engagement events and activities for remote employees. Additionally, you can incorporate powerful apps to unify their experience in an environment where they can naturally grow and thrive. We recommend our intranet portal on Teams combined with Microsoft Viva to help you elevate employee engagement. It is a great tool to drive innovation and productivity while bringing employees closer to your business systems and workflows. To learn more about our engagement platform, please click here.

5. Monitor and course correct

Adoption monitoring is important to evaluate deployment success of Microsoft 365 in your organization. It gives you insights into product usability and overall productivity to quantify your results. This information is crucial to understand what your users liked and disliked about the platform. Given that, you can build measurable success factors to increase ROI. This also enables you to revise implementation in tractable stages to achieve higher adoption levels.

Before we wrap up, we encourage you to not limit yourself to quantitative data to check adoption progress. In general, it’s possible to overlook the struggles that end users face behind the scenes. With this in mind, approaching users to learn about their experiences personally gives you the low-down on their pain points. On the other hand, it shows that you are considerate of their challenges too. On the positive side, you can make meaningful improvements by cultivating a close partnership and positive excitement for change.