The Value of Adoption in the Digital Workplace
DIGITAL WORK ADOPTION GUIDE FOR MID-SIZE ENTERPRISES
The definition of work has changed considerably in the last few years. As the nature of work continues to blend traditional offices with digitally enabled virtual spaces, employers need to be prepared to pivot their operations and culture to take advantage of the new opportunities that come along with these shifts.
Embracing more flexible, hybrid work models?supported with?digital workplace technology, such as Microsoft Teams,?offers several potential benefits including:
Achieving these top-level benefits depends upon one key factor: adoption.
By adoption, we mean incorporating the right technology fully into the organization with a focus on enabling high value use cases and ease-of-use without sacrificing security.
Despite recent advances in workspace technology, adoption remains a challenge for organizations in all industries. Even with perfect technical execution, there are several obstacles in the way of achieving good adoption, and many organizations struggle the get highest levels of business value from their remote work technologies.
And because the success of hybrid/remote work is enabled by technology, much of the burden for success has shifted to IT teams, with organizations looking to their technology teams to make everyone ‘remote-work ready’.
So, what is the best way to ensure that your organization achieves success in adoption of new virtual work technology?
In this guide, we’ll highlight the ways to do it, and how to sidestep the biggest obstacles along the way.
?We'll address the following questions:
Why Adoption is So Important
Organizational change usually isn’t a smooth process. It also has a terrible track record. In fact,?over half of organizational change efforts fail, usually because people are naturally resistant to change and don’t like to step out of their comfort zone.
This certainly applies to deploying new remote / hybrid work technology into your organization. The rapid pace of change due to the pandemic only added to the daunting task faced by organizations looking to maximize their investments in new processes and technology.
Without a good adoption strategy, employees are being asked to change how they work without fully understanding the benefits and embracing the change into their daily routine. As a result, adoption will be sluggish and expected business value will be out of reach.?
Lack of adoption also leads to significant drags on financial performance because of wasted technology expenditures.?According to 1E, the average enterprise (at least 30,000 seats) spends $7.4 million a year on unused and under-used software, and over one-third of the software is rarely used or not used at all.
Successful Adoption Creates Positive Outcomes
A well planned and executed digital workplace adoption program significantly increases the likelihood of realized gains across the enterprise. When users fully incorporate a solution like Microsoft Teams into daily work, they see the potential to resolve existing pain points and frustrations. This creates a snowball effect of further adoption and increased value of the technology to the business.
With good adoption, organizations can expect to see positive movement in the following areas.
Work Flexibility
Flexibility in the workplace provides benefits in many forms for the organization and its people. Being flexible means organizations can quickly respond and adapt to new circumstances in markets, supply chains and cybersecurity. It also means providing more choice and accommodation in employee schedules, work locations, etc. to improve productivity and work-life balance.
Blending synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration and communication through digital workspaces also allows teams to save time in fewer meetings, as they can work in a distributed, on-their-schedule fashion while still having the choice to build and share ideas face-to-face, then continue work individually with digital collaboration, co-authoring and file sharing capabilities.
Flexibility is especially important in fast-moving industries, where agility and resilience may mean the difference between success and failure. In competitive industries, a flexible work structure may also offer advantages in acquiring and retaining top talent.
Employees expect flexibility not only in where they work, but also in how and when they work. This seems more apparent in a post-pandemic world. Research conducted by Microsoft shows that workers the flexibility and choice of remote and in-person work—70% of workers want remote work options to continue, while 65% also want more in-person time with their teams, according to their?Work Trend Index.
Microsoft Teams, along with updated organizational models and hiring strategies, enables much of this flexibility because it brings together people and their data, apps, and workloads—all in one place so everyone can work on their own schedules, remote or hybrid, and in the ways that drive the best outcomes.
Boosts in Productivity and Engagement
When employees are satisfied and engaged in their work, the?positive outcomes?are clear: reduced absenteeism and turnover, improved productivity and profitability among others. However, engagement can take a hit when the personal connectivity and comforts of the traditional workplace is switched to remote work.?
Virtual work tools provide flexibility in how, where, and when people get work done. Unified digital workspaces such as Microsoft Teams provide rich meeting and collaboration experiences for people inside and outside of their organizations to participate more naturally and feel more ‘included’ in virtual sessions.
Remote participants no longer have to feel like they are at a disadvantage to their peers attending in person. Also, employees can use features such as channels and chat to create the digital equivalent of impromptu “hallway” conversation.
These asynchronous work features help to nurture a more satisfying feeling of connection to people and to the purpose of the work and minimize digital overload from constant meetings. The seamless integration of video chat, phone and mobile accessibility also helps to make virtual work easier to manage, more enjoyable and impactful.
Improved Information and App Security
Shifting to?cloud-based, digital work?doesn’t mean making sacrifices to security posture. In fact, the end-to-end security and advanced threat protection in best-in-class solutions such as Microsoft Teams ensures you will be more protected in today’s evolving threat landscape.
As part of Microsoft 365, Teams comes with?enterprise-level security?features like data encryption in transit, single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Also, data in the application is ISO 27001, SOC1, and SOC2- compliant.
Transforms How Work Gets Done
The adoption of digital workplace tools can also help you transform how work will be done and how customers are served in the future, without the limitations of physical spaces and technological roadblocks.
For instance,?best-in-class digital work solutions such as Microsoft Teams allows work to be transformed in several ways:
Microsoft Teams offers the potential for new levels of productive, creative work styles by blending synchronous and asynchronous work in a unified workspace, with the familiarity and connectivity of the Microsoft 365 suite of apps. The fear of missing out by missing in-person conversations is resolved with information transparency and asynchronous work tools.
Teams can also help you achieve new levels of collaborative connection, all while gaining more flexibility in their work styles, and without feeling disadvantaged by being remote.
How to Avoid the Most Common Obstacles
While there are many potential benefits to be gained from investing in digital workplace technology, there are a few obstacles to be aware of when preparing your adoption strategy. No matter where you are in the digital transformation journey, these roadblocks can slow your progress, or worse, halt it. Here are the biggest obstacles to achieving successful digital workplace adoption, and how to overcome them.
Resistance to Change
Shifting to remote and hybrid work can cause a lot of disruption, not just with technology, but also with the people side of the business. It is completely normal for employees to be resistant to changes in their daily routine, especially if the change comes fast, as it did during the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions.
In our experience, users resist adoption of new enterprise technology for two main reasons:
One of the biggest ways to minimize resistance from users is to communicate the value early, frequently, and in ways that relate directly to their work. We also recommend getting users involved as much as possible in the implementation through needs assessment, requirements gathering, testing and post launch feedback.
Not Understanding User Needs and Expectations
An essential step in any enterprise technology adoption effort is having a good understanding of how employees currently and want to work, including specific functional needs, motivations, and pain points. Unfortunately, many new implementations fail due to a lack of proper research into employees ‘jobs to be done’ before introduction.
A key consideration in adoption is that it starts with people.?People are all different, and in most cases, project stakeholders don’t have a full understanding of the user context.?
To foster stronger adoption, it’s important to understand the different contexts in which your people are working before forcing change upon how they work. Use a more user-centered approach by soliciting open-ended, in-depth user feedback and incorporating this into the adoption strategy. In some cases, these conversations may uncover opportunities to get even more value from the implementation.
Technical Knowledge and Inadequate Training
The latest digital workplace technology is intuitive and easy for most users to learn quickly. Still, some training and help resources should be offered, especially for employees who lack technical skills, or will use it infrequently.
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The first step is to be aware of and empathic to the wide range of technical skills you have across the workplace. Then, prepare employees with an introduction to the most essential features, followed by more detailed training for advanced features.
Your employees are unlikely to retain everything they need to know from a one-time demo, so plan for a progressive, interactive onboarding approach if possible. Finally, make resources, documents, and additional training easily accessible, and connect new employees with mentors and support for a smoother introduction to the work.
Planning Your Adoption Strategy
Now that you know why adoption is so important and what the biggest obstacles are, you can be more prepared to develop a strategy for successful adoption of Microsoft Teams. While every adoption project will vary by size and complexity, we recommend following these steps in most cases to optimize adoption and maximize business value.
Note: these steps assume that you have already?planned your enterprise deployment?from a technical point of view, including creation of a technical team and assessing your technical architecture.
Step 1: Assess Organizational Readiness
As discussed above, organizational change can be uncomfortable, and you should expect some employees to be resistant to changes in their workflow. Start by assessing your organizational readiness for change and just accept what you learn as part of the process.
Win over naysayers and gain stronger support from leaders by working with them to incorporate specific needs and concerns from their teams into the plan. Keep teams involved by co-creating solutions that address constraints and concerns.
Not all users will be apprehensive and resist change; some will embrace it. Enlist these early adopters to help design and implement your adoption program and champion it throughout the organization. Rally their support to be your internal advocates to persuade the laggards, who will be the slowest groups to fully adopt.
To assess your organization's readiness, get answers to the following questions:
What is the overall level of interest? What percentage of users are:
What is the overall skill level? How much and what kinds of training do I need?
Step 2: Build the Right Adoption Team
?An effective adoption team is comprised of the smallest number of key stakeholders who can not only implement from a technical standpoint, but also influence change. This small cross-sectional representation of the organization should have the desire, availability, knowledge and credibility necessary to get things done and overcome challenges.
Key roles?should include an Executive Sponsor, Service Owners, IT professionals, and Champions.
Form working groups and an oversight council of these stakeholders for regular planning and progress check-in sessions. This group will provide valuable guidance along the way to ensure a good match between the adoption plan and organizational capabilities and culture.
Step 3: Rollout in Phases
Are you giving everyone need enough time to process and adapt to new tech and workflows? Introducing Microsoft Teams in stages is a great to give the organization the time it needs to fully digest and catch up to the changes you’re introducing.?We recommend?Microsoft’s approach?to breaking your adoption into three phases—startup, experiment, and enable – to streamline adoption.
Start Phase
This is the stage where you establish initial teams and get them to plan the Microsoft Teams adoption. The start phase is crucial because it helps you familiarize yourself with the software. It also ensures that you develop the necessary skills required to scale the next stages.
Experiment Phase
This stage is where your innovators and early adopters come in to test the app and identify its benefits for your company. Then, you'll use their feedback to develop an effective full-scale Microsoft Teams adoption.
Scale Phase
The scaling stage involves launching and deploying the broad-scale adoption. You can implement this phase full-scale if you've got a small team.
However, you may want to approach this stage through segmentation for large groups. You can do this region by region, department by department, etc.
Tips for Achieving Successful Adoption
Even with a well-designed plan, you may still encounter bumps along the way that impede adoption. Here are some best practices that we recommend for a smooth adoption.
Plan for the Long Term
Many adoption strategies fail because they aren't scalable to match the evolving future needs of the organization. Your adoption strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate the growing needs for remote, hybrid work, and be able to take advantage of future innovations.
Avoid a piece-meal approach, and don’t fall short on investing in upskilling to match the technology. Plan your adoption strategically to reinforce a culture that encourages a digitally focused mindset and pays dividends into the future.
Prioritize Management Support from the Start
Organizational buy-in at all levels is essential to a healthy adoption. Executives and front-line managers will play a key role in getting their teams onboard and using tools as designed.?Ensure that you involve business stakeholders and executives from the beginning as they add credibility to the process. Without their support, adoption will suffer, and business value will be limited.
Design a Thoughtful Learning and Training Program
A thoughtful learning and training program follows a user-first approach that focuses on the most important use cases and incorporates user feedback. It is not enough to generically train your team on features. A thoughtful approach connects the features to the work in a meaningful way using examples and case studies, and different formats such as video, guided learning paths and contextual help.
A thoughtful training plan includes:
Thoughtful training caters to different skill levels and learning styles. Microsoft provides a wide range of?free Microsoft Teams training?options including on-demand videos and online guides designed for all levels of user knowledge, from the newbie to power users. They also offer specialized?Learning Paths?to get the most out of features within Microsoft Teams to work efficiently and build collaboration.
Cultivate Peer to Peer Learning
One of the most effective, and enjoyable ways to learn is from friends and co-workers. Luckily, Microsoft Teams (and the whole Microsoft 365 suite) offers lots of ways for employees to learn from each other.
Gradually redirect teammates from email to Microsoft Teams by encouraging them to have conversations on the app. Then, utilize all the necessary Microsoft Teams features to drive engagement. For example, you can leverage the software's Events with Q&A.
Invite team members to discussions using the @ mentions feature. This draws their attention to essential messages and ensures they don't miss out on any vital information.
How Plus+ Can Help?
The future of work is happening now. Are you ready?
Companies that stay on-premise are missing out on capabilities to enable remote hybrid work and spur innovation through improved teamwork and communication. Leading organizations are re-envisioning what it means to work and gaining the benefits of cloud-enabled solutions.
Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft 365 suite enables everyone at work to share information in real time, allowing for easier and more efficient collaboration. Access information and communicate from anywhere, at any time, from any device.
Plus+ helps you get the most value from these solutions by providing services including readiness assessment, strategy and design, implementation, custom application development, and post-launch services to boost adoption and business value.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have over 20 years of experience helping enterprise businesses across several industries migrate to a modern workplace using the power of the Microsoft 365 platform. We’ll help you bring your people, data, and communications together with the Microsoft 365 suite to enable next-level collaboration with best-in-class security.
Speak with one of our solution advisors?to get started or to accelerate your journey to the future of work.
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