 Ahmed says, despite SharePoint's capabilities, we're facing low adoption rates among our staff. Many find it complex and intimidating. What strategies can we use to boost user adoption and what training resources are available to help our employees become more comfortable with SharePoint? Training, training, training, training, training, and more training. No. Ahmed is correct. SharePoint is complex and intimidating. But if you force them to use it, they will have to adopt it. So how do you force them to use it, right? You create some lists for any of their paper processes that need approvals. You build workflows and you force them to go there. That's it. That's how you get adoption. You force them to go in there because they want to go travel and go do a training or they want to get their credit card limit increased or set up or they need to do something. And the only way to do it is to go into your SharePoint, go find the list, type your data in, or you get an email that says, hey, you've got a request from someone else and you need to click a button. That's it. You force them to do it. Now, all of the trainers on this call are going to tell the other one. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You know what you're saying is that people have to want it. You have to make them want it. And if something else is painful, yeah, solve their problem. And you know, yeah, I want to go on a trip or I need to get my expenses paid where that's painful. So paint the paint. Let them show them how painful it can be and show them how easy it can be otherwise. And we gently nudge them into it. Not force them. I'm seeing Jonathan in some kind of grotty hole. You've heard me share my story. I know you've heard Sherry. You know my story about my son. It's my change management story about helping my son realize that he didn't need me to drive to pick him up after track. And so what I did was I publicly embarrassed him pretty severely. And it was all good fun and done with love. But he then never asked for a ride again for the short walk home. It worked. I made change happen. So yeah, I mean I learned some lessons there too and it's still a really funny story that he hates hearing me tell. But there's something to be said about rather than the stick method of nurturing the redirect instead. You think of like a toddler. They're getting their hands in something they shouldn't be. And the way you teach them or a puppy, for example, is not just to take the thing away from them and anger them and confuse them. It's to, hey, look at this other thing. And I know it always sounds bad when I remember my direct reports that were just like, you're talking about us like you're potty training puppies, like that's not, we don't feel positive about that. Right, but it's like it's on a bait and switch. It's very much like it's community management. When you see people that are doing things the old way, you redirect them. And that's true when somebody sends an email when, hey, the thread of the conversation is over in teams or the SharePoint issue is like somebody saves down locally and creates a new file, thus eliminating the benefit of versioning inside of SharePoint or a one-one drive. And so you redirect there that effort back over towards, you know, like this is why we do this, this is why. So it's important to have that aspect, call it training, call it management, call it, you know, again, I don't know what to, what to call it, what you guys call that, but again, I just say redirect, you'll redirect those behaviors and over time, I might just forget that. You're changing habits. Well, I think you have to add to that though, that if we lead them there to fill out that list or we lead them there to do something in a different way, we're changing that habit, that may not be encouraging them to explore more and learn other things that are on that page or in that SharePoint site or in that team, wherever it is we're taking them. So that's where I think that it's really key that you need to have that training early on. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from end users in a company where they just upgraded us to this and said, here you go, but I don't know what to do with it. So there definitely has to be an incentive as everyone has been saying to get them there and they know what they're doing there, but then there needs to be something that gets them to find those Easter eggs or whatever you're gonna do to get them to explore more and understand that the importance of it and the reason that you're wanting them to adopt this. Cause if it's just that one thing that we're sending them there to do, I don't know that it's going to get them to that next level of learning and knowledge. I wanna add some perspective to this. So one of the things that we do a ton of consulting on is SharePoint and we do push people to teams to use it for collaboration, but sometimes people need SharePoint. They need SharePoint to do what it is they're doing. And here's the thing I try to let people know. SharePoint is a tool. It is a platform. You don't wanna be like, use the SharePoint. Sit and watch 30 hours of training on the SharePoint. Nobody wants this, right? So I get hired all the time because people are like, SharePoint is a bad word in our organization. We need you to solve that problem. SharePoint, where you would call it? SharePoint. Go learn the SharePoint. Go use the SharePoint. Like you don't hear that, right? And so what we try to do with our clients is we make it not SharePoint because SharePoint is scary and SharePoint is big and SharePoint is complex. But if we work with your team to implement an internet that's familiar to you, if we work with you to implement tools that are familiar to you, to Jonathan's point, nobody thinks of SharePoint as the travel form or the training form or, it's just where I go to find my HR information or where I go to get news or where I go to get information or where I go to start a process. So I mean, I think the key here is if they're struggling with low adoption rates, then they're not solving problems and they're not making their own. What they're trying to do is say, use the SharePoint and train on the SharePoint instead of we're using it to solve this problem or we're using it to do this thing or we've branded it and named it to something that is familiar to our users. So think of it that way and I think you'll have a much higher adoption rate. Sharon, are you thinking of it from, that it might be overwhelming if they're just like sending them there and that it should be very focused, like, okay, we're gonna focus on this this week and then, okay, next week we're gonna teach them about this so that it's chunking those smaller bites and kind of get them along the way. Yeah, well, and it's also use case driven, right? So who are you talking to? If you're talking to admins, that's gonna be one conversation. If you're talking to developers, it's gonna be another conversation. But if you're talking to just everyday business users, most business users don't need to understand that SharePoint is SharePoint. They need to bookmark a link to fill out a form, right? They need to understand that if they put stuff in a certain place, it's gonna get saved with versioning and if they put it in a different place, it won't. They need to understand, to Dan was making this comment earlier, if you have a PowerPoint presentation open and you're editing it while somebody else is presenting it, you could be impacting them. Those are the use cases and the training parts and the information that they need. But really what they need to know is, how do I do this? How do I do that? And so if there's no way for you to train them on those use cases, then you're not using SharePoint, right? You're just being like, here's a box of Legos, have a good time. Well, a business user is gonna be like, I mean, okay. So I've run a whole heap of adoption programs around this, just won an award for exactly this. And on this particular space, we broke it down. It was, why isn't it being, and it wasn't being used. They had had it for two years and it wasn't being used. And they had a CHAMPS program, but the CHAMPS were, they were occasionally turning up, they were occasionally answering questions, kicked a whole heap out. And I just went, who's gonna actually come back and tell me that they're actually kicked out of the group number one. Then did a recruitment drive around the CHAMPS. And from there, we did an education piece. And we started with the CHAMPS that those that were actually really enthusiastic. One, we looked at, was it even answering the problem for the SharePoint site? So as you said, Sharon and everyone's talked about what was the problem, what was it serving, what were the needs around it? And was there still information that need to be migrated? You know, are they living across multiple worlds? And they were still living across multiple worlds which made it tough around adoption. So there was confusion of where to go and why too? So what does it look like from an environment number one? After we changed and we've done the training with the CHAMPS champions, we then went in and I started running some sessions on various tech when it comes to SharePoint. Cause there are different things. There was, what is good collaboration? Working on the guys. They understood from a mobile phone. Setting up a, just a setting up a standard site. It was, you know, surfacing information, dealing with videos. And then we broke them down and with the CHAMPS champions, we then broke it, we broke it right down. And we started to do regular little sessions a couple of times a week. Within the first one around understanding just document collaboration and then with teams and things over the top. And we went into all of that in terms of surfacing it through there. And cause there's so many facets. Once they started, we saw how 539% growth in the business from just 31 CHAMPS in this organization. So we started from the CHAMPS and then I went out and I started working with a senior leadership because they're still sending attachments and they don't understand SharePoint and they're working from their mobile phone and they don't get it and they're forcing the organization back into older ways of working. So I started doing some workshopping with those guys around and understanding a return on your investment around sending a link because pain is money. So if they're struggling, it's like, well, why are they still sending attachments and understanding the benefits around it, the financial physical dollar around what does it look like to have that old habit and how fast can you be and how much it's taking in storage that's costing you for, you know, because you're creating more and more documents and they need a monetary value to hit it on the head. So from there, I started to run two weekly 15-minute sessions for the business. At first, we did a couple of overarching, just general one hour, you know, what are the fun, what are we trying to do? Getting to know, get to know your champs so they knew who they were and we broke it down into all these little 15-minute sessions and out of the 500 people in the organization, we had 150 on average every session because if you build the program right and we had a SharePoint site directing all of the conversation, we created a list with all of the past information on a Microsoft list and that list had here's all the presentations, here's the previous recording and here's to link to further learning if you wanted to do it. And that went all up on our SharePoint site so it started to surface all the information that we were actually presenting. So from an adoption perspective, at the end of it, and it's just won a federal government award for the modern workplace project and it was mentioned all the change in the program that we actually did. So it was phenomenally successful. If you do it right, guys, you can turn businesses around and it will take time. It's not necessarily a really short quick fix. People think that they're just gonna fix it like just like that. And it's like, hello. No. You don't have to make it in time. It's a cultural change. Well, change is a cultural thing. And again, it's about breaking bad habits and you have to replace bad habits with healthy habits. And like I had two, I'm a big leaderboard guy. I like the gamification things around that. And two things that I'm working on, these are just smaller ideas and fit right in. It doesn't alter anything what you've just shared would be like, so I love the whole, and I made assignments sometimes as a manager but offered you had an open door for people to come and do a brown bag. Every Friday they were sharing, here's what I built. It wasn't supposed to be perfect or even done, but here's what I'm working on, here's what I'm doing. Those always had excellent turnout. The other thing is what we started, we initiated spot awards where somebody could recognize something that someone else had built in the technology. So when they started recognizing each other and there was a cash value, it was like $20, like Starbucks cards or whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But there's a monetary value in the budget to go and recognize people like, Heather created that great app or I love that plan that Sharon built out and shared with us around this. And I didn't know that you could do that with a list and those kinds of interactions. And then you start, people start looking at ways and how can I get creative? How can I do more than just the minimum of dumping this data into a spreadsheet and doing something like, no, I want to go and make this shareable. I want to do it the right way and then share that out there. Again, different things motivate different people, but if you have multiple things like that, love the champion's program, that idea, identify and reward the people that are sharing. That's number one. Yeah, they did a fabulous job. Recognition, recognition from senior leadership as well. We had a recognition, we did a list that we put as little boards so anyone could go in and do recognition. And then each month it would then go as part of the all hands in terms of recognition. There's a lot of ways and they kind of go, then that was going into SharePoint because they were going into do recognition posts and things. So we got them a little excited about it. In terms of where do you go around training and being a trainer, there's a lot of great content. There is the productivity training. You've got quick guides that you can actually go in. I've pasted all the links here for you. So they've got a productivity library, your quick start guides. As SharePoint Maven has got some fabulous content you can go to go and have a look at the SharePoint Lookbook. It was in the SharePoint Lookbook. It's got some great content on how to actually set this up and build it. Not only that, but there's a lot of really awesome just plug-in SharePoint sites. Use the Champs management platform to do some gamification. Use the brand center to drop in. There's all these great sort of SharePoint templates that you could build out com sites. They're, you know, Microsoft have created this content. It's just in GitHub, just plug it in, ready to go. So cool content there guys, yeah. So in addition to that though, it's great to have all of that. I agree, we need all of that. And I was going to suggest having the meetings monthly even to show the users how to use it. From a user perspective, this flat architecture is wonderful. Hubs, site hubs are wonderful. But if you have a mega menu on your main hub and a mega menu on your project site, the users will get lost. They will get lost. That is an advanced option, not a beginner's option. Give them some sites with a few menus and a lot of pictures, pictures that you can click on. And they have a word or two that says, do your timesheet, expense report, credit card, travel, whatever it is. A picture versus just a library of options. Exactly. And don't get me wrong, I've made my fair share of mega menus. Granted that was 2000, 2001, but they're back and I get it and they're needed in the right places after you've got adoption. I'm with you, less is more. I wonder too, I have to think of some of the companies that I've been helping. They've moved everybody over to SharePoint or Teams, but then they still have some on-premises server going. And I have to, it seems like that's a hindrance where they still have that place they're familiar with and are they going to still try and stay working there instead of adopting the new cloud-based libraries and the things that have been set up. So I don't know, are all of you seeing something similar to that can be a hindrance? Lots of people still have this. And one of the ways that I've dealt with that in the past is if you build out pages with links to the other place that at least gets them used to the new UI and then eventually you just move their stuff over behind the scenes. The key is really to get them on one UI and you want them to be online. If everything's gonna end up online, get them online first. But yeah, I mean, it just happens everywhere where people eventually, it's the idea of I have a box here and a box here and a box here and a box here and I've moved some of it, but I haven't moved all of it and so then it's like still left over here. And a lot of times, if it's complex or if it was somebody did development around it or it's hosted, like maybe it's content that it's links to somewhere that's on-prem and so like, well, we can't move it to the cloud for X, Y, Z reason. But the key is get them using the newest, most modern UI possible, even if you know that those are links back to that space because that at least gets them as far over there as possible and then behind the scenes, you can kind of take time to get it over there. But yeah, it's very common, unfortunately. And I always like, I always think of Sherry saying whenever we're talking about this stuff of you don't box up the junk and move it over to the new house. They do, right? I just do. And the senior leadership are the worst ones. It's quicker. Senior leadership are the worst ones. Sorry, not sorry. Yes, I'm saying it in my outside voice. All day long. I don't wanna change, yeah. Unfortunately, they're like, I've always done it this way. Yeah. From a learning, from a learning. I need to keep everything. I need to keep everything. I'm gonna look at it again. I promise. If you can. Learning, get at the learning management platform, guys. It's pre-built by Microsoft for your training. You can just plug in with all of the content. You can customize it. There's a really great, there's a great community spotlight that was done by Microsoft with Karawana in the adoption space. It was in June. I'm gonna drop, it'll have the link in there. BMO did a really great learning platform site around helping of training in this particular space. It was that, you know, the difference between the push and pull of, you know, going and getting training or searching for it yourself. So, you know, there's plenty of information there and you can put those into some links for you.