Getting your employees excited about office changes can feel like a tough battle. Employees may have loved the platforms that they are already used to because they have complete mastery of it, but there are many instances where you need to have the support of your employees to help move the company forward.
While SharePoint was not well-adopted in 2010, a Gartner study revealed that its 2013 version was much more popular, as its enhanced functions offered enterprises the assistance they required. Thankfully, there are a few simple strategies that you can implement to make sure that your employees not only accept SharePoint, but actually fall in love with it. It’s not hard to do once you know what to look for, so don’t lose any more hair over the situation.
Here are three easy ways that you can make sure your teams love SharePoint and never look back.
1. Create Awareness
The first thing that you absolutely need to do is to make sure there is an awareness about SharePoint and how it works. If people don’t know anything about SharePoint, it will be counterproductive and you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and money. Let your employees know about SharePoint and what it is before you start rolling out with it. If people are not prepared for SharePoint, they don’t have time to get excited about it. They’ll be too busy getting stressed and frustrated about the platform to feel any type of excitement. The earlier you get a jump on the gun, the better off you will be.
2.Connect the Process and Influence Adoption
Once people start hearing about SharePoint and talking about it, it’s time to connect the process to their daily tasks. Employees won’t care about something unless it impacts them directly, either positively or negatively. Since employees take the negative route more frequently, it’s up to you to show users exactly why they need to have SharePoint in their life. The best way that you can do this is to show your teams how streamlined their everyday tasks are. You can do this by demonstrating the software, creating a video, or writing the details down in an e-mail. No matter what you choose, you want to make sure your employees know why SharePoint matters to them.
Be sure that you keep pushing after you get people excited about SharePoint. You need them to adopt the new platform with open arms, and that means that you’ll need some strategic influencers in your business. If you can get more experienced staff members excited about the platform, you’ll have a much higher level of adoption from your workforce. Gartner analyst, Mick MacComascaigh, recommends highlighting “power users” within the office to lead the way in SharePoint adoption.
3. Customize the Training Process
Of course, you need to take the time to train your employees on the new platform. Even the biggest levels of excitement can fade when people run into a wall of frustration. Frustration is typically due to lack of knowledge, which is why you need to customize the training process. You want to train in a professional manner, and that means that you need to best approach for each and every training type. Since SharePoint is designed to cater to a number of different job roles, you need different training sessions for different departments. Don’t lump everyone together and hope that things will stick. People won’t care about what the other departments have to learn, so create a custom learning experience what is short and effective.
Some approaches, such as digital guidance systems, can cater to a number of different learning styles. These tools walk users through the learning process and give them helpful tips as they learn at their own pace. No matter what approach you choose, make sure that you think about your learners and understand what they need.
Get People On Board Now
If you want people to love something, they need to understand it first. Be cautious and don’t overwhelm your employees because it will be harder to win them over after you lose their initial trust. Think about how your employees will benefit from SharePoint and start talking to people and answering questions now. You’ll be glad you did down the road.
