Forum Discussion
Solved
Do end users need formal training on Office 365 apps?
Hi All,
I have a couple of questions regarding Office 365 user adoption:
- Do you think end users should receive formal training -- instructor/champion-led sessions -- to be taught how to use Office 365 apps like Teams or PowerApps, for example?
- Is there an expectation that end users will just learn as they go, without any formal training, and do their own research to learn more about how to use the Office 365 apps if necessary?
Personally, I think end users should be provided with initial training sessions on apps that are new to them, and periodic sessions on specific features, updates, etc, so that they can make the most of all that Office 365 has to offer.
What is your experience with these?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Graham
HI Graham McHugh - This is a great question. I'd encourage you to redefine what "training" means in our current environment. What we find is that many people are unlikely to attend an actual class but the demand for short videos that are task or scenario based is high. Think "playlists" like on Spotify or on your music library. People need to know something exactly when they need to know it so we're going that direction overall.
That being said there is always some demand for virtual or instructor based training that helps people "get" the basics of what the new experience is. 45 minutes seems to be a sweet spot for these trainings. The virtual version is good because we find people stop and start the trainings to try things in the product. Also it's a best practice to establish internal Champions and these folks usually are highly engaged in more in depth training.
Remember all training needs to be in the context of what's in it for the users themselves. What I think is super cool may not help someone else in a particular role. This is why we're so fond of the playlist model and integrated this into our Custom Learning for Office 365 training site template which will be broadly available in Q1/CY19. This SharePoint Online site template with a custom Webpart will allow you to customize the playlists, included products and look/feel of the experience and it's easily pinned in Teams. We'll announce its availability here and in the Driving Adoption community as well.
At the end of the day this is our chance to increase the digital literacy of our workforce and (as I always say) get people to STOP emailing that spreadsheet around! Hope this helps.
- Interesting how a question from over a year ago still very relevant today, I just finished giving a couple of training sessions at a customer taking advantage of the freeze period at the end of the year, all the feedback was very positive, of course user will intuitively learn how to use O365 but i guess the idea of the training is giving ideas and insights on how to get started on the new tools or how to take full advantage of new features. Of course I got a lot of questions for help after training was done but it is being very satisfactory to see increase on the onboarding levels. So yeah go for the old fashion but still efficient instructor/champion led training
- I just found this thread and realized that I'm very late to the party :-).
So many insightful things have been said in this thread. I love the passion and excitement that all of you have in helping your end users and each other as well with ideas. Kudos to you all!
The only thing that I would add to this thread is that in my humble opinion, empathizing with your users' needs goes a long way. The best end user adoption resource is the end user herself. Ask the key people in each department what are their pain points and then truly listen... I mean actively listen! Then help them understand that you are on their side and are here to help make their work life easier. Once you have the key people and influencers in the company on your side and they truly believe that you are there to help them, the magic of user adoption will start taking shape.
Best wishes!- Great points - "listening" is a skill that Teams enables in a couple different ways. You can actively listen to a meeting, you can read something someone has typed in a conversation and you can watch recorded information (or even review or search the transcript). This helps users learn and use what is going to be most helpful to them at the time.
Training is a must or people stagnate with the apps. I think we have Excel users that are still only using skills they learned in Lotus 123. What we do is have a Skype webinar every week on Office 365 and Windows. It is 15-20 minutes of training on the apps (different topics each week) and Q&A. We have 8 office in the US and Canada with about 300 total people.3 offices participate as a group from conference rooms and others join from their own PCs. We average about 28 people per session only but also get views on the recordings. We have a MS Form that users can use to submit topics and try to get guest presenters/co-presenters from our user groups like show and tell.
Getting VIPs to prioritize training and require it of the staff is very hard. Everyone is busy with their jobs and often they don't make time to learn. The scare of cyber attacks has made many office require the security training but productivity training is not required.
What a great thread and some fantastic advice in response.
Eric Eaton raised some great points about on-demand, in context help. Choosing a good 3rd-party platform allows for other custom contextual help, like his suggestion on governance. Another product to look into is Content Panda.
I like Karuana_Gatimu_MSFT's advice on creating playlists and engaging Champions to scale your training strategy. Whether they presenting a brief scenario during a team meeting or giving some 1:1 training, they are trusted experts in the business and of the business.
I'd add the tactic of recording your success stories and presenting them as teachable moments. Interview your subject. Ask them about their job and a general comment about the product you're focusing on. Then have them describe their scenario.
Capture their screen, be it with software or a well placed over the shoulder shot.
Have them step through what they do with the software in the scenario.
Finish with a comment from your subject about the impact of using the software with the scenario.
Real stories showing examples in the context of real work will offer bite-sized training and inspire.
leslie tiku's suggestion to develop a knowledge sharing / learning culture is critical. You must provide a place for community-based learning to encourage a dynamic where people share and help each other. Community will help create a culture that supports the continuously changing environment of M365. Think about a strategy combining a Microsoft Team, SharePoint, Stream and Yammer, to provide a learning community. Create or curate your content in SharePoint, embed Yammer groups to provide the conversation alongside content, deliver quick interviews and bite-sized training live over Teams and embed the Stream recording into your SharePoint community site.
Combo's like this not only provide a community platform but also demonstrate the possibilities of the products for other work scenarios.
darrellaasI really like your point on communicating success stories and including screen recording with individuals walking through usage of a function and benefits of it. Working on some pilots recently and been thinking of ways of communicating the success from them and I think THIS IS IT! Thank you for sharing :)
This is a very good end user adoption guide from Microsoft.
Hi,
A good training and communication plan is key.
A classic classroom training, lunch & learn session, … is always a good idea.When u have experienced power users in place, they can help your end-users on a daily basis.
On top you can provide a good eLearning tool, ea Oase (link below), so end users can train themselves continuously. (specially for O365)
check out also this approach from Microsoft: https://partners.office.com/changemanagementframework
eLearning link:
https://www.oase-office.eu/en/
- I deliver two courses at our workplace - a "Getting Started with Office 365" course which covers the basics of what O365 is, Cloud Computing, Security, and then looking at OneDrive for Business, sharing and collaboration using Office (both desktop and online) and depending on course attendees and pace we may look briefly at working in groups / teams. The second course is "Collaborating with Teams and Yammer" and assumes some knowledge or attendance on the first course. The second course is delivered throughout using a "Training" team set up for that course cohort and left in place for 3 to 4 months after the course as a "play pen" for people to try things out without disturbing or affecting their real workiplace teams. We deliver through a hands on practical based course running for c3 hours and find it gives people a really good grounding and they go away enthused and ready to use teams in their day to day work.
Hi Graham McHugh,
For the specific case of Microsoft Teams, I drove the adoption in my company and I found that the tool could be easy to understand through videos or tutorials. What is not so easy is to organize a team in a way that it really makes people lives' easier in regards to collaboration and communication.
The concept of channels and tabs is a bit complex to understand for all end users at the beginning.
I found that understanding the business, building some use cases on how Teams can give value for them and spend time directly with leaders and their groups to guide them, it's a good way of doing it.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Mar- I feel that some introductory training is helpful, but one of the most beneficial approaches in my opinion is to use Microsoft Teams to help people learn teams. What better way to learn something than to use it.
- Thanks for that, MaR_6h. I agree with everything you said - particularly the last paragraph.
For my company, I am doing Teams training's at least four times per month.
True, we have low attendance at times unless I email the invites to the HR Managers in various parts of the company, and they forward the invites to their employees.
I have found, so far, that this works best. Adoption is going up steadily. The trend over the past six months has been encouraging.
I post articles and "reasons why" to the employees, and this helps greatly.
So far, so good. But I do believe in formal training's of an hour long.
Without training, then employees will think they know it by using only 10% of the program.
Great points. I've seen that work well if you can get management to encourage people into those events. I like the thought of highlighting the reasons why. That's super helpful because it attaches the feature you're highlighting to something in real life. It's also important when communicating governance. Users are frequently more accepting of guidelines if they understand it's not just an arbitrary preference of the admin team.
End users should receive a training (show and tell) in our opinion - since ways of doing changed in Online/365, it will be helpful for end users if a formal training (show and tell) conducted. Of course all the features and functionality cannot be shown in a training, but it will be a boost for them to learn more by themselves later.
if some tech-savvy end users wants to know more nuts and bolts (technical) details, I suggest direct them to good online course - for example pluralsite.com. It will be more than enough for tech-savvy.
