Office 365 for HR Teams: Discover the O365 Onboarding & Adoption Process

Are you ready, HR? The O365 ball is in your court!

For years, IT has owned the deployment of Microsoft Office products. But as the Office 365 revolution grows, businesses must change the way they’re handling Microsoft Office adoption. Why? Because O365 is designed to be managed by business unit owners– not IT.

Office 365 is Microsoft’s fastest-growing commercial product ever. Your company’s goal with O365 is to create a fully digital, collaborative workplace – because that’s the value of O365.  But it takes more than just learning how to use Outlook in the Cloud. It has more than 20 productivity apps (in addition to Outlook/Word/Excel/PowerPoint).  It’s a fundamentally different way of working.

Microsoft said it best: The successful adoption of O365 requires behavior change.  That’s where HR comes in.

Need to talk about O365 solutions?

Let’s cut to the chase: After installation, O365 no longer belongs to IT.

O365 Onboarding Process

So, who does it belong to? Because O365 changes the way businesses approach their internal systems, companies need to create a streamlined experience and empower their end-user. That means lots of training, onboarding, and new processes – tasks generally in the realm of HR.

Take a minute to picture your IT team evangelizing O365, overseeing the O365 rollout, integrating O365 into business processes and managing company-wide adoption. Yeah, they can’t really picture that either.

(Quick caveat: we’re an IT training company. We serve IT professionals first and foremost. IT teams definitely play a crucial role in O365… this just isn’t it.)

O365 Adoption Guide

To help simplify companies’ O365 adoption, Centriq created an Adoption Framework to help guide you through the process (and to help optimize results). The process is broken down into five product paths:

1. Lunch and Learn or Webinar:  Office 365 – What to Use When
   During this step, our O365 Product Specialists will dive into how to drive adoption with Office 365. We’ll cover most of the O365 ecosystem, focusing on what each app does, when to use them, and what they can do for your company.
2. Office 365 Workshop #1 – Overview of O365 and Your Company
   Next, your company’s executives will join us for a two-hour, private workshop where we collaborate on how Office 365 apps can work for your company specifically.
3. Office 365 Digital Adoption Champion Boot Camp
   During this ten-day accelerated training, we’ll train your Champions on how to use the Office 365 apps so they can lead your company’s O365 adoption plan.
4. Office 365 Workshop #2: O365 Implementation and Adoption Planning*
   This four-hour private workshop is facilitated by your O365 champion(s). We’ll determine the priority for implementing Office 365 apps and will work to develop an adoption and training schedule.
5. Staff Training for Office 365
   Finally, we’ll identify how to train your power-users and unit-leaders. We’ll develop customized, private app training for your staff and will follow up with additional video training for support.*Final structure TBD

Download the graphic for your team here.

Now what?

Office 365 is the on-ramp to Digital Transformation. Office 365 is overwhelming— there’s no doubt about it. If you’re asking yourself “now what?” you’re not alone. This five-step Adoption Framework isn’t the same for every company— all businesses have different needs and are at different places in their adoption journey. Centriq offers a variety of resources for each of the five steps, from personalized, hands-on workshops to dedicated training solutions depending on where you are in your O365 journey.

Let’s talk about it!