SharePoint User Adoption
How to successfully drive end-user adoption of SharePoint for your business
1. Why should your teams use SharePoint?
SharePoint is a platform designed to share and manage content and seamlessly collaborate. It’s layout can be designed in multiple ways to suit your specific business needs.
Compliance – in heavily regulated industries compliance is essential, SharePoint can help you stay compliant.
Collaboration and project management made simple, this can lead to the breakdown of department silos, creating a better team culture.
Can be used to engage and inform your employees quickly of new company announcements and used as a company intranet.
Business processes can be transformed.
Can reduce overall business costs through better efficiencies.
2. Why do end-users resist?
SharePoint implementation within a business primarily focuses on improving technology, what is often overlooked in successful adoption is changing human behaviour. People don’t like change to their existing routine. Common reasons for resistance are:
Users don’t think SharePoint will be useful for them.
SharePoint has so much to offer, users don’t know where to start.
The business already has systems in place to do their job so end-users have no driver to change behaviour.
Users have had a bad experience of SharePoint in a previous role or company.
End-users are driven by a legacy mindset of using shared folders or mapped drives.
Roadblocks to use/rigid governance policies – complex security policies and access permissions, making the end-users job harder than it needs to be.
They find SharePoint hard to navigate and quickly become lost when trying to navigate between different systems built on SharePoint (aka – SharePoint sprawl).
Companies see SharePoint as an efficient and cost-effective way to store and manage content, as well as to improve collaboration, however, it can be perceived as hard to use by end-users. To counteract this, you need to plan your adoption strategy just as carefully as you designed and developed your SharePoint environment.
3. How can you drive successful adoption of SharePoint within your business?
Share your vision for what SharePoint will achieve for the business – how do you get users to buy in?
Explain why you are changing the way you want teams to work
Communicate the benefits of adoption, for them and the company
Map SharePoint capabilities to business values, goals and functions
Communicate frequently to inform and inspire – create an adoption communications plan, pre, during and post launch. Have engagement events, webinars, hands on learning, emails, launch events, etc.
Enable users with training – show them why they should use it
Manage change with minimal impact to users – they only need to know about what will affect them
Show them how SharePoint can help them do their job more productively
Create a hub of easily accessible training – cheat sheets/ webinars/ demos etc that users can refer to
Monitor regularly – stay in touch with users and offer regular refresher or advanced training
Monitor regularly – stay in touch with users and offer regular refresher or advanced training
Shine the torch on highly valuable SharePoint capabilities, such as well thought through search and search result pages, efficient business process and easy access to critical business information.
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