Drive awareness and implement training for Microsoft Teams
Awareness and training are the marketing and communications segment of your overall adoption strategy. Training helps ensures that your employees are aware of the new capabilities of Microsoft Teams and its underlying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 services and apps.
For both your initial pilots and your eventual company-wide roll out, your internal communications should be a priority. They should include:
- Internal awareness materials such as posters, digital signage and events.
- Self-help and training information in a single location.
For your pilot phases, the minimum steps for success are:
- Have a regular scheduled meeting with your project stakeholders for updates.
- Make self-help documentation available, including product videos.
- Hold a kick-off meeting with the pilot users to get them excited about their participation. The importance of creating a sense of community with enthusiasm can't be overstated.
After you've worked through the initial pilot, you can expand the efforts above to reach your entire organization. Depending on your size, expanding across your organization may take time. You can approach the phases by many methods, such as region, user profile, or organization. During this larger scale rollout, encourage the involvement of the communicators in your organization. We recommend these individuals be involved early and often as you use the available adoption materials or design your own.
If your company has a central intranet portal for news, information, or support, you can use it as a hub for information about this rollout. Provide widely available self-help information, training, and written guidance to let users quickly come onboard. Many users will jump in after Teams becomes available and we encourage this enthusiasm. We also know that each individual learns in different ways; a central information portal can support all styles of learning within your organization.
Implement end-user training
Use our resources to deliver end-user training as people begin to use Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 or Office 365 services. Visit our resource pages to learn more:
- Administrator training for Teams
- Online End-user video training
- Coffee in the Cloud online training for champions & IT pros
- Adoption Tools
Measure and share success
As with any communications and adoption campaign, you'll want to identify your success measurements up front. Consider the following measurements:
- Active users in the product
- Views of your information webpages
- Questions in your user community
- Views of your training videos
- Attendance at learning events
Share the insights you get from your feedback channels with the hashtag #TeamsStories for easy retrieval. Share a #TeamsStory per month on your intranet to highlight employees who are embracing the change to increase productivity and collaboration in your environment. Also share them with us in our Driving Adoption forum on the Microsoft Technical Community. Sharing these real world examples from within your own company is valuable to realizing sustained change over time with your user community.
Learn more about the Microsoft Teams usage reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
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