Forum Discussion
Do end users need formal training on Office 365 apps?
HI Graham McHugh - This is a great question. I'd encourage you to redefine what "training" means in our current environment. What we find is that many people are unlikely to attend an actual class but the demand for short videos that are task or scenario based is high. Think "playlists" like on Spotify or on your music library. People need to know something exactly when they need to know it so we're going that direction overall.
That being said there is always some demand for virtual or instructor based training that helps people "get" the basics of what the new experience is. 45 minutes seems to be a sweet spot for these trainings. The virtual version is good because we find people stop and start the trainings to try things in the product. Also it's a best practice to establish internal Champions and these folks usually are highly engaged in more in depth training.
Remember all training needs to be in the context of what's in it for the users themselves. What I think is super cool may not help someone else in a particular role. This is why we're so fond of the playlist model and integrated this into our Custom Learning for Office 365 training site template which will be broadly available in Q1/CY19. This SharePoint Online site template with a custom Webpart will allow you to customize the playlists, included products and look/feel of the experience and it's easily pinned in Teams. We'll announce its availability here and in the Driving Adoption community as well.
At the end of the day this is our chance to increase the digital literacy of our workforce and (as I always say) get people to STOP emailing that spreadsheet around! Hope this helps.
I have similar dilemas.
When we started to push OneDrive to replace old personal network drives and to sync desktop & my docs, less than 60% of people turned up to sessions, despite them being practical short sessions.
Teams has been an organic adoption with a lot of people wanting to use it without guidance, this has issues too with limited understanding of it capabilities and lots of duplicate teams. We ran an internal email campaign with a Tops Tips Sharepoint page and got just 12% of people clicking through to the page.
It feels some days like we are forcing people to use new tools, we have to progress and would love to understand how other people get staff engagement
I hear you. I think there is probably a need for mandatory training -- at least to help users understand how the different apps fit into their organization's big IT picture, and to be shown examples of how the apps can be used successfully. I also think planning before diving in is essential -- otherwise things could potentially spiral out of control -- with duplication of efforts, not using the best app for the job, etc.
