As a way of illustrating this, I’d like to share one of the activities we do with many of our clients to help them maximise adoption of Microsoft 365.
Before we implement any sort of knowledge and learning programme, we do a knowledge needs assessment. This isn’t really designed to assess ‘what’ people know, but the behaviours they have now that will support or undermine the desired outcomes. For example, we ask questions related to sentiment and work styles, as well the sorts of applications they currently use to do specific tasks related to the strategic goals set at the beginning of the project.
Recently, we’ve been doing a lot of Microsoft Teams rapid deployment with clients to help them address an immediate need for home working driven by the coronavirus pandemic. And we developed a short, 13 question survey we could tailor to each client.
When we analysed the results of these surveys though what we’ve noticed is two things across all clients:
- Even though email use to share files internally drops significantly – it doesn’t stop and is still high by comparison to other methods.
- The use of 3rd party applications to share files is higher than expected at the outset and remains high even after Teams has been implemented.
This gives us a clear message that there are still staff for whom the context of sharing via Teams still doesn’t make sense. That could be for a variety of reasons; perhaps they didn’t attend the online training sessions or perhaps their colleagues don’t share files with them – making them less likely to adopt the behaviour by osmosis; or perhaps they just don’t want to!
Whatever the reason, because this is about choice and as there is little likelihood of turning off Outlook or blocking access to third party applications their working style can continue unchecked.
To be honest, this isn’t the problem it appears to be, after all if they are doing the job, should we worry about how they get it done?
The answer to that question is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ because again, it depends on the context.
If staff work mostly on their own documentation with little collaboration needed, and yes there are still many office jobs that work in this way, then it’s unlikely to have any great impact in the short to medium term.
However, if these staff work with many shared documents, such as Excel workbooks, then they could potentially hold up their colleague’s workflow because they effectively ‘lock’ the documents in silos they cannot get out of.
Microsoft 365 training is never going to address these two scenarios because it’s not the ‘how’ they need to know, it’s the ‘why’ and that is what context is all about. And this is borne out by our survey.
What we’ve also found is that it isn’t lack or acquisition of skills that drive this behaviour, the personal rating people give themselves across a range of skill sets does not correlate with the use of specific applications. Again, it appears the determining factor is context. For example, even in organisations where Skype for Business has been the only messaging application for several years, the skills set around uncommon behaviours such as sharing screens was lower than might have been expected in all the organisation’s we surveyed given the length of time the application has been available.
To overcome this inertia, a range of knowledge and learning opportunities must be made available which addresses both how and why they use Microsoft 365. After all, the process of learning is irrelevant if no real knowledge is acquired.
This is the reason why we’ve banned the word training from our vocabulary at Silversands, and instead we work with knowledge and learning.
Knowledge involves understanding, comprehension and mastery. It’s about acquiring, sustaining, growing, sharing and applying information to achieve an organisational impact.
Knowledge helps us plan what people need to know in order to make the desired behaviour change. We do this by mapping personas and scenarios onto the strategic goals of the organisation. Once mapping is completed, the required knowledge is added to the matrix. We also encourage clients to help their users develop a minimum set of digital skills, defined by the Government’s Essential Digital Skills Framework:
- Digital foundation skills
- Handling information and content
- Communicating
- Transacting
- Problem solving
- Being safe and legal online
When the knowledge plans are complete, we focus on Learning. Learning helps an organisation structure the opportunities people will have to acquire knowledge, and training is just one of these.
Going back to our short Microsoft Teams deployment survey we noticed that respondents in every company had similar preferences:
- Assistance from others around me
- Web based information from the company
- Email hints and tips
- Learning on my own through trial and error
- Contacting the service desk
- Printed training materials and classroom style instructor lead training