If you are here, chances are you realized there is a gap in SharePoint activity reports & the stats need to be improved in your organization.
People usually don’t like changes & hence, the newly rolled-out SharePoint can be left to avoid. But user adoption is not a one-time initiative. Instead, the organization has to feed over time to make the transition fluent.
In this article, you will learn the user adoption playbook for SharePoint. Let’s jump in.
Microsoft SharePoint is an excellent tool for information sharing & collaboration. In SharePoint, users can create sites, pages, document libraries & lists.
Additionally, people can customize their content by including new web parts and sync & store files in the cloud, so employees can work with them while maintaining security.
If your organization introduces SharePoint, it’s for the following advantages.
- It safeguards confidential data & protects it from unauthorized access.
- Helps the company financially by putting all websites under SharePoint. This helps to reduce overall costs.
- In SharePoint, users store & share data from a document library, allowing stakeholders to put their comments & reaction on the draft.
- Offers broad integration with existing apps like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, ERP, CRM, etc. & works flawlessly.
- SharePoint Online is compatible with all modern web browsers.
However, it improves the user experience and simplifies everyday tasks; not all employees are tech-savvy & want to deal with new challenges. What are the troubles they are encountering? Read along to know the answer.
Though a company fully implements SharePoint, it doesn’t get the full benefits for lacking proper user adoption. Research shows that most employees don’t get the value from the software for the gap in the adoption process.
People want a consistent workflow & shilly-shally to make a transition from the traditional method to the latest change. But why the hesitation?
According to AIIM’s report on Impact of Microsoft SharePoint 2016, around 50% of responders prefer to follow their old traditional method & avoid transitioning to the latest tech requiring a massive level of switch in their profession.
Among the responders, 29% had yet to learn what SharePoint offers, while only 23% adopted the features. As for getting new things without practicing is human nature, the lack of training continuity sets back the employees when they have to apply the skills learned from training.
The report also mentioned 66% of responders referred that it’s a bit complex to use, and 64% said the superiors provided little support to sustain the deployment of SharePoint. In addition, the majority of responders blamed inadequate training.
So, what can improve SharePoint User Adoption? Continue reading to learn advice to boost Microsoft SharePoint adoption.
Though you can be excited to embrace the new changes, not all employees share your enthusiasm & think otherwise. Most of them will want to avoid SharePoint, thinking of it as a part of the IT sector, and don’t desire to deal with it.
But to preserve the adoption, you have to learn & reinforce some factors to increase SharePoint intranet user adoption. Below, I’m giving some pointers that helped my co-workers adopt SharePoint quicker than they thought. 
Training is the core initiative & should be a never-ending process to stabilize & boost user adoption. The training need not be expensive but requires continuity to succeed in the Sharepoint implementation.
Before arranging training, you have to make a plan. Set goals, target your audience with what they want, and make a real-work scenario, so the workers can apply the knowledge from the training. Besides this, assist the trainer & set up a training portal to deliver training regularly.
You have to keep the continuity of training & apply it in real-world work scenarios. If the company abandons training, it becomes hard to recover as new functionality rolls out to SharePoint.
Don’t force the user to learn & execute SharePoint applications all at once. This can backfire most of the time. Though it is recommended to stay away from folders in SharePoint, if you force them to switch to Metadata, they will be resistant.
Make small phases for better adoption. You can split the stages into,
- Education: Instruct them about SharePoint & its capabilities.
- Revelation: Tell them what benefits it has to add value to the company.
- Site Design: Create a design according to the organization’s needs that help the user adoption.
- Easy Configuration: Take advantage of SharePoint’s customizability & create lists, libraries, metadata, navigation, groups, etc.
- Training: Provide continuous exercise to keep up the workflow.
3. Involve Champions
If you join a company, what will you do? You will try to observe others and how they work & try to follow your superior. Well, that can get you a promotion. Jokes aside, it is more likely workers will follow & try to adopt the changes if their bosses follow the new technology.
If your team leader has expertise in SharePoint, his associates will be more comfortable asking for help as they work together on a regular basis. So you must involve these SharePoint champions to extract more from the workers.
Furthermore, support the experts with additional training, as they can make a difference in adoption across the organization. This will make the champions more confident in keeping the team updated with the latest features, endorse their problems & keep the team motivated.
If you introduce complexity at the beginning, the users will find SharePoint as complicated. This will result in less attraction to adopt the changes.
Instead, making quick access, allowing remote access, cleaning the site & making it user-friendly with essential features will boost the appeal to adopt SharePoint. If you put 5 links in quick launch & tell the user to pick the right one, it will be easier to choose than having useless 20 links in the global menu.
So design the site & customize the navigation in SharePoint with users in mind. Make the site exciting for the users, rename library names, organize the files, and create a metadata-driven navigation structure for a smooth experience.
5. Arrange for Feedback & Evaluate Ideas
A feedback session is crucial to enhance the adoption. You have to know where the users are facing difficulties to resolve them. If the users don’t get what they need, they will back off.
With a proper feedback mechanism, whether it can be arranged at lunchtime, you will know what they have to say to fix the possible issues. This increases integrity when a user sees you hear their thoughts & their problems are getting resolved.
Create sessions with 5Ws (what, when, where, why, and how), which will make it easier to understand the user about SharePoint and share & assess their ideas to make the transition easier. The feedback session will make the users more engaged & active for potential improvements.
6. Cut Out Alternatives
People want to have an interest in new things. So you have to put a carrot to encourage the users. You have to motivate the users to use SharePoint & tell them it has a well-organized index system with dashboards. In addition, the company will only communicate & engage with SharePoint.
In this case, you have to remove other alternatives & force them to learn & use the new option. For example, if you cut access from Google Drive & tell them OneDrive is your only choice or you have to use Teams to communicate, they will have no other choice & have to adapt to the situation.
By following these methods, the users will be motivated enough & will be encouraged to embrace SharePoint.
Final Thought
Involving SharePoint champs, removing alternatives & continuous training can help the user SharePoint acceptance. You have to give excitement to users about new things. Switching to SharePoint can be challenging if the users are not motivated enough. But in this article, I explained what can be used to boost user adoption.
