"From Investment to Impact: Ensuring Microsoft 365 Delivers for Your Business

With 345 million active Microsoft 365 users globally, it is no secret that cloud skills for knowledge workers are becoming increasingly essential. However, with frequent updates and new releases, it’s easy for your employees to fall behind and underutilise your investment in Microsoft 365 licensing.

Having helped organisations with digital transformations for over 20 years, I can confidently say that 8 out of 10 times, the drive behind these transformations is rushed. The main factors often include the need to decommission server rooms, reduce licensing costs, and most notably since 2020, the shift to remote work. With tight budgets, a scalable and lasting adoption approach is often overlooked. At best, organisations arrange training sessions during the beginning of the transformation project, which is a positive step. These sessions help users build confidence and understand how to use the tools provided.

However, employees leave, and new staff join throughout the year. So how do you retain this knowledge within the business? If you expect your employees to sit through lengthy training videos, let me tell you—most won’t. Instead, they’ll resort to Google or overwhelm your IT support team with questions.

This is why it’s essential to view adoption as an ongoing process. Ensuring your employees utilise the tools you've invested in is key to maximising your return on that investment.

Microsoft offers excellent resources to help you conduct an adoption strategy and work on a plan to ensure high engagement scores across your organisation. Adoption Score is a helpful way to categorise your business’s progress, focusing on two key areas:

Employee Experience:

This metric tracks how employees interact with Microsoft 365 tools, focusing on:

• Collaboration: How users share content and collaborate through tools like Teams and SharePoint.

• Communication: Usage of Outlook and Teams for conversations.

• Meetings: Frequency and effectiveness of Teams meetings.

• Mobility: How employees use Microsoft 365 across devices and locations, particularly mobile use.

Technology Experience:

This measures how well your tech setup supports employee productivity by analysing:

• Device Performance: Monitoring startup times, app responsiveness, and other hardware-related metrics.

• Network Performance: Evaluating how network latency affects the performance of cloud-based services like OneDrive or Teams.

In my work, I’ve often been on calls with clients who have genuine business needs that could significantly improve their operations. Yet, they have no idea that they already have the tools within their Microsoft 365 subscription to achieve their goals!

Many organisations subscribe to tutorial platforms or record past training sessions. While these can be helpful, how realistic is it to expect someone in finance to sit through a SharePoint admin course just to figure out how to tag a document or use a custom finance template?

This is where M365 ChatBuddy comes in. With our solution, users can simply ask the AI assistant something like, “How can I create news on our intranet?” Instead of browsing lengthy tutorials, M365 ChatBuddy delivers a clear, step-by-step guide, often with a short 60-second video demonstrating the process. We’ve found this to be the most efficient way to help organisations adopt Microsoft 365 tools and get the most from their investment.

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Measuring Adoption Success:

Once you have established your adoption plan, the next step is to measure its success. After all, you want to know if your investment is delivering real value. You can track the effectiveness of your adoption using metrics like:

• Increased Productivity: Look at how much quicker employees are completing tasks. For instance, after adopting Microsoft Teams, how much faster are decisions being made? You should notice shorter turnaround times for tasks.

• Reduced IT Support Tickets: As users become more familiar with the tools, they should rely less on IT support. Fewer help desk tickets for simple queries indicate that users are becoming more self-sufficient.

• Time Savings: You can measure how much time employees save by using more efficient tools. For example, using OneDrive and Teams for document collaboration should reduce the back-and-forth emails and duplicated efforts.

• User Satisfaction: Conduct employee surveys or feedback sessions to gather qualitative insights into how comfortable users feel with the tools. An increase in positive feedback signals a successful adoption.

By tracking these metrics, you can demonstrate the value of your Microsoft 365 investment and ensure that your adoption strategy evolves with your business needs.