Organisation benefits of training your users

Now that your organisation has decided to go to SharePoint / Office 365, does that mean that all your users can just go ahead and start working with the new tool? Just like with any other application, your users need training and coaching to make sure they know what they are doing, and that they are doing it correctly!

Benefits of a trained user

Next to having users know how to browse through the information and being capable of doing their work, there are some extra benefits as well.

Drive user adoption

This sounds like a no-brainer but it is crucial to the roll out and use of the platform. When you are teaching users how to use the platform, they will get insights in how the platform will help them do their work more effective and efficient. Therefore, when teaching, try to teach solutions, not features.

Less calls to helpdesk / IT

By not only teaching your users SharePoint, but also how to use it correctly will reduce the amount of calls your users make towards your helpdesk. This is a good way to reduce costs in the organisation.

Reduced stress levels

Linked to the benefit of less calls to the helpdesk, another one is that employees will have more confidence in using the platform, therefore feeling less stressed out. If they know that security is set right, no versions will be lost and they can find the correct information, the risk of stressing out on the workplace is lowered leading to happier employees (and less stress related sick days).

Higher productivity

By reducing the time people search for information or letting them work together on a specific document, productivity will go up. For most companies, this is the number 1 reason why they choose SharePoint, so make sure that users know these benefits and use them appropriatly.

Feedback loops from users in training

Learn what functionality is needed from users by receiving feedback in training and coaching sessions. This way you can improve future training sessions and give input to developers or the application team in terms of needed functionality.

Emphasize on the topics that are important to the organisation

There are a multitude of reasons why organisations get SharePoint, like reduce costs or speed up time to market. By supplying users with training material or coaching sessions, you can steer the message in the right direction, focusing on these topics that are important to the company.

In summary, training your users has much more benefits then just learning how to use the platform. These benefits were covered in my talks around “Training your organisation on Office 365”.

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.