Employees today need to be able to work as effectively, productively and collaboratively as possible, regardless of where they are located. Unsurprisingly, companies are rolling out platforms like Microsoft’s Office 365 (featuring Teams) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) in the hope of enabling flexibility in the workplace while maximizing their own digital agility. But as they do so, they are realizing that there is a lot more to success than just implementing technology.
In particular, it’s vital to adopt the right implementation approach. Collaborative platforms offer a sophistication and range of features that necessitate a structured, systematic implementation plan: one that focuses on business impact. That impact, and the maximization of the return on investment (ROI), depends above all on successful adoption of the technology by the workforce, which in turn depends on changes to individual behavior.
What can management do to make sure these types of changes happen in practice? It certainly helps to roll out the technology in a way that fits your organization and empowers staff to move towards new working practices. But, even more than that, you need to be able to monitor progress against your business’s strategic goals and your objectives for the rollout so that you can take corrective action if any gaps arise.
That monitoring has to take place against KPIs that reflect your organization’s strategic goals and business objectives. Useful though it can be to know how long people are spending in meetings on your new platform, it is far more valuable to be able to compare that with the time spent in alternative meeting forums (physical or virtual) and see how the relative metrics alter over time.
In this blog series, we’ll look at some of the steps your organization can take to ensure that rollout of collaborative platforms achieves your business objectives, even in complex scenarios where it is just one of a number of initiatives taking place concurrently. Meanwhile, please download our new guide Realize the Full Transformative Value of Microsoft Teams to see how the approach we advocate can be applied to one particular platform.
We believe you will find this approach invaluable whether you are in the planning stages of your rollout, have already started, or indeed completed it. Either way, you will find out ways to stay on track with the rollout, adoption, and use of your collaboration platform, and ensure maximum benefits and ROI are realized.
