SharePoint Administration | Notes Administration

How To Get Co-Workers to Use SharePoint

Here's the situation - you're excited about the new SharePoint installation. After months of work, you've got the full system in place. And now....no one in your organization is using it. How do you get them with the program?

Sadly, the most common SharePoint training methods are the least effective. That is the key conclusion from Michael Sampson's User Adoption Survey.

According to the survey, the most common methods of getting employees to use SharePoint are (ranked in order):

1. Help pages- users go to reading materials on their own
2. Classroom training - with a group of users
3. Web-based training - including webinars

In terms of effectiveness, this list correlates as the methods judged least effective by trainees - with help pages being least effective. And classroom and web-based training being only slightly more effective.

The most effective methods of training were (ranked in order):

1. One-on-one coaching
2. Scenarios - where SharePoint is visualized helping in a particular work situation
3. Executive sponsorship and support

Effective training was also found to present the most basic concepts first. This included describing SharePoint, its tools and how it works conceptually at the outset. Sampson also encourages trainers to remember that "user adoption is a process, not an event." Wise words.