A successful change management relies on clear and helpful communications about the upcoming changes. The only way users will know about their new way of working is if it’s successfully communicated to them.
For a successful Microsoft Teams adoption, it is recommended to follow a structured approach that can drive change. In order to achieve that, a consolidated communications plan must be in place to ensure maximum user adoption. A communication plan is your roadmap for getting all information about Microsoft Teams project and delivering to everybody in your organization. It’s an essential tool for ensuring a smooth and stress-free implementation throughout the process.
Like any other change management project, the objective is to create a plan to manage a change affecting your whole organization. Effectively, there are five components of the adoption change management strategy: build a team, set goals, communication planning, adoption strategy planning, and Plan, Achieve, Measure.
Build a Team:
Before you can get started sketching your adoption plan, you must first assemble a team of stakeholders and make sure they know their roles – in this case, to take responsibility and ownership of various aspects of rolling out Teams adoption in your organization. To maximize your change management strategy, create a Team within the tool to provide end-user education while getting end-users acquainted with using the tool. Empower the team to guide, teach, train and communicate the benefits of Teams with their colleagues.
Set Goals:
The very first step toward increased adoption is setting a specific and achievable goal. Setting goals help align the priorities for you and your employees, identify problems and needs and define the measures of success. The goal of change management is to help each individual impacted by the change to make a successful transition for adoption Teams.
Communication plan:
Now that you have your stakeholder team built and your game plan sketched out, you need to come up with a plan to communicate your message about the initiatives you will be carrying out to the rest of your organization. There are several delivery methods you can use to communicate the service rollout information to your targeted organizational groups and users.
Determine the Message: Explain what? why? and how? Together with your team, come up with a message to communicate your goal to the rest of your organization.
Share the Message: Think outside the box and make it fun! Once you’ve decided on your messages for each group, the next step is to come up with a plan for how you want to encourage Microsoft Teams adoption and roll out to the stakeholder groups.
Spread the Message: Awareness! Once you’ve started sharing your message about Teams adoption, the next step is to make sure your message is received by as many people at your organization as possible.
Re-align the Message: Share success stories and gather feedback. Once you’ve ignited awareness, the next step is to share success stories and gather feedback from your stakeholder groups. At this point, your initial message may need some adjusting to reflect employee experiences.
Adoption Strategy Planning:
Any IT-focused Microsoft Teams rollout strategy can be problematic. Microsoft Teams is designed in such a way that organic growth is expected. So, a well thought out change management strategy is extremely important to achieve successful Microsoft Teams adoption. The strategy should be built taking into consideration a company’s culture, values, and political landscapes at a high level, and individual roles and responsibilities and the environments in which they operate at a more micro level. With Microsoft Teams implementations, a change management strategy is key to help employees understand what to expect and what is required of them. It establishes a roadmap and reassures employees that the organization is committed to, and, more importantly, prepared for the change.
Plan, Achieve, Measure:
As you move further on the journey of transforming teaching and learning, it is necessary to continually assess your achievement in the adoption process against your goals and adjust your plans accordingly. It’s also important to celebrate both the wins and successes and challenges. Lessons learned are invaluable to ensure your employees do not repeat the same mistakes.
The feedback to achieve and measure can be gathered in a number of ways, including interviews, surveys, polls, etc. Individual progress and cumulative impact need to be measured a number of times during the Teams transition to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your change management plan. By measuring multiple times, you receive early warning of the need for revisions to the plan in order to achieve the desired outcomes.
Leave a comment below to let us know what change and management strategy worked for you for successfully driving the Teams transition.
You can find our first blog from the Adoption and Change Management series here to learn more about driving Microsoft Teams adoption, and read the best practices for Teams adoption on our third post here.
