By Janus Boye
Like many other large, global and complex organisations, Rabobank already had Microsoft Teams in place before the advent of the global pandemic.
When everybody suddenly started working from home, usage spiked to new heights. This meant that efforts to ensure adoption became more even important and also that existing challenges became more pressing and a few new ones surfaced.
Casper van Amelsvoort is Global Service Owner One Digital Workspace at Rabobank and kindly shared his perspective in a recent member conference call.
How to ensure adoption of Teams
“You can support users, but never waste a good crisis”
This was one of the memorable quotes from Casper, as he shared his insights on how Rabobank has worked to make it a smooth adoption of Teams as a part of the home workplace. Their dedicated adoption team has worked diligently to help people about new tools, how and when to use Teams, and also better ways of working.
Rabobank has a group of champions, which are “normal” employees recruited throughout the company to help colleagues. Some champions are nominated by managers, while others have signed up on their own. They aim for roughly 1 champion per 20 employees.
In terms of training, Rabobank has decided to not rely on the videos provided by Microsoft, as they are considered to be too far away from the life of the Rabobankers and also a bit too thick on the marketing. Instead, Rabobank has produced their own brief step-by-step videos to help colleagues and this has been well received.
To avoid confusion and too many support calls, Rabobank has decided to turn new features off by default. At the bank, they release new features in so-called “rings” to small groups of colleagues to get them tested and to also have time to create documentation.
Casper also shared how they regularly reach out to employees and ask them about how satisfied they are. One interesting recent finding was that colleagues are most satisfied with the Teams app on their mobile devices rather than Teams via the browser. For usage data, Rabobank relies on the the Microsoft provided adoption dashboard, based on Microsoft Graph data (for free with the right license).
Challenges with Microsoft Teams at Rabobank
“Teams is clearly not initially developed for the enterprise, but more for SMEs”
This quote from Casper stood out clear as one of the many challenges. Both in terms of the design, depth of features and administration, there’s several shortcomings to a tool that’s so widely adopted in the workplace globally.
Casper also highlighted performance issues, where VPN, Teams and Skype clearly aren't friends.
Specifically on Live Events, the advice from Casper both internally and in our call, was to make sure to practice first before you actually host an event. It’s far from intuitive and clearly still in development.
Finally, we talked about data labelling, like finding resumes. Resumes contain personal and sensitive information and tend to be in mailboxes, but a good solution to manage them is clearly missing.
Learn more
You can download the slides (PDF) from the call.
Before the global pandemic, Andrew Pope wrote a popular post on Teams - Everyone Is Talking Teams: How To Prepare - where he shared his insights and reflections from a few of our recent Future Workplace peer group meetings.
On the topic of Office 365 adoption, this Canadian member story was one of our most read posts in 2019: The Office 365 Adoption Challenge: “I Barely Have Time To Do My Work. When Am I Supposed To Find Time To Innovate?”
Finally, we have a Microsoft 365 peer group in Denmark which you can join. If you are based somewhere else and interested in a local group, please do let us know.