To successfully launch the adaptive workspace within your organisation, the entire process from purchase to launch is of great importance. The Workspace 365 Customer Success team supports you, our customers and partners, to take the right steps to successfully roll out the adaptive workspace within your organisation. But what does the Workspace 365 Customer Success team do and what are the steps to make the process successful? In this article we explain how the Customer Success team helps to successfully launch Workspace 365.

The Workspace 365 Customer Success team ensures that you can successfully roll out the adaptive workspace within your organisation and supports you in this process. This is not all about technical support, but goes well beyond that. The Customer Success team translates the challenges into solutions and ensures that the entire process surrounding the implementation of Workspace 365 runs smoothly.

The Customer Success team guides the process in a proactive and personal way and provides the right tools to support the process and increase the adoption of the digital workspace. Good preparation and clear communication is essential here.

The technical side of the process towards a digital workspace is important, but the people are equally, if not more important. The changes are made to make your employees work easier, so that they can focus on what really matters, their work.

For this reason, it is important that all employees know how to use the workspace and actually embrace it as their new way of working, which can sometimes be difficult for some employees. Adoption is therefore an important part of the process towards a digital workspace. The focus is on the acceptance of the new workspace, enthusing and training employees, collecting data about how the workspace is used and collecting and processing feedback.

To make this change successful, the Customer Success team will help manage this change on the "soft side" of IT, to ensure that your employees embrace the new adaptive workspace within your organisation.

The "soft side" of IT

There is an increasing need for support on the "soft side" of IT. This isn’t about the technical aspect, but about the whole process around it and about the people who will eventually use the workspace. The support that the Customer Success team offers on the "soft side" of IT is sharing best practices, providing both tactical and strategic advice and guiding an IT project.

Communication with your employees is essential! It is therefore important to shape the adoption strategy. What will be the tone of the messaging? What are the benefits of the new workspace for your employees? How can I create interest and enthusiasm among my employees? These are questions that you must map out in advance in order to be able to communicate clearly with your employees.

To help you with this, we have email templates as examples of how you can communicate about the new digital workspace.

Note: Everyone processes information differently. It is a good idea to think about other forms of communication, for example goodies (cups, pens), quick start guide placemats, folders, posters, etc. to make employees enthusiastic in this way. Use a communication strategy that suits the organisation to generate awareness and enthusiasm.

To ensure that the process runs as smoothly and successfully as possible, we have created a Blueprint that contains all the important information you need. The steps you can follow to make the process successful are:

At every step of the process it is essential to remember: your workspace may be about technology, but the most important thing is that your employees embrace the workspace. They are ultimately responsible for the success of the transformation.

In this article we will take you through each step, so that you get a good idea of what is expected of you in the process from purchase to the launch of the digital workspace. The Workspace 365 Customer Success team supports you every step of the way.

At the kick-off of this project, there are a number of factors that need to be determined to ensure that the entire process runs smoothly. First of all, the division of roles of the project team. Who is responsible for what and what roles are there within a project team?

Role determination

The project team must consist of people who represent one or more parts of the project. A project leader, technical, communication / adoption and functional. On the basis of this, responsibilities are divided and action points are determined.

Mapping the technical landscape

To get a good idea of the current IT landscape of your organisation, the Customer Success team helps to map out the technical part. What is your organisation using now? Which components should anyway be in the new digital workspace? Together with a Technical Success Maker, it is examined which technical links need to be realised.

Set goals

Success cannot be measured without goals, which is why the Customer Success team helps define goals at the beginning of the journey. It looks at your needs and how the implementation of the adaptive workspace and the way of working can contribute to achieving these goals. These goals guide the process and help determine its success.

Once the objectives have been mapped out, predefined, structured sessions are planned together with the Customer Success team, in which steps are taken to achieve the set objectives. If all goals cannot be achieved in the desired timeline, then priorities must be set. What can wait and be realised at a later time?

In this step, a complete inventory is made of the organisation: Which applications, information and communication are used? Which employees use of this? What are the different methods, processes and challenges?

With all this information you can start creating basic layouts of the workspace per persona group. The Customer Success team will help you with this step by offering templates and examples that will give you a clear idea of ​​what the process looks like.

Create personas and test groups

Creating personas gives you a good impression of who works in your organisation and how they work. In this way you find out exactly what they need from a digital workspace. Use the persona presentation for examples and inspiration.

Once you have mapped the personas and know what they need from a digital workspace, you can start setting up a test group. Within a test group, include a number of employees from different departments who are involved in the process. These are employees who are experts in their field and who can think along with the process and contribute to the adoption of the digital workspace.

Note: It may be tempting to include the CEO or higher management in your test group, but it is better to include them at a later stage in the process. In the first stage, they have different priorities and tasks that they deal with, depending on the sise of your organisation. By improving the workspace with the test group, you can solve problems before they emerge during the rollout of the digital workspace.

Early adopters

Find employees who support change and are eager to change. They will quickly see the opportunities of the workspace and be eager to test and improve it.

Laggards

Of course, your organisation is not only made up of early adopters - there will always be employees who find change difficult. It is important to include these employees in the test group as well. In this way you find out what the challenges are for this group and how they respond to them. In this way you can improve the workspace, offer training courses and adapt communication so that this group of employees can provide even better guidance with the new digital workspace.

IT pros

On the other hand, your organisation may also have people who have more experience with IT. By adding this group of people to the test group, their expertise can be used. They are likely to see the potential technical challenges and opportunities of the workspace.

By including early adopters, laggards and IT pros in the process from the first stage, you can immediately respond to feedback they give and collect to improve the workspace. In this way you give your employees the feeling that they are being heard and this increases the chance that they will embrace the workspace and enthuse colleagues.

Communication with the test group(s) is extremely important, especially in the case of a digital adoption process. Make specific agreements for fixed contact moments, feedback sessions and training. Communicate as much as possible via video and telephone and less via email, for example. In this way you keep communication personal.

Inventory

With the inventory you can determine which applications your employees or employee groups need, which technology is used, what needs to be replaced, which applications and features you already have and which you still need. You can use the blueprint for this. With all this information you can start creating basic layouts of the workspace per persona group.

After the inventory, it is time to set up the workspace and ask for feedback from the employees. The Customer Success team guides you through setting up the workspace by means of a session. It is also possible for the Customer Success team to provide training and make videos for the end users. After you have gained all the knowledge about setting up your digital workspace, you can continue setting up the digital workspace within your organisation.

Basic training & test group training

Based on the inventory, the workspace is set up per user group. Shared Spaces are a great tool for keeping your workspace organised and structured. This is especially useful if you are part of more than one team, have a wide variety of tasks, or if you are an admin. When someone regularly shares the screen, such as a teacher with their students, spaces are ideal for securing sensitive information (such as emails in the email live tile).

Branding

The branding is the first thing people see and is therefore very important. If it is recognisable and organised, people are more likely to be use their digital workspace. As an administrator you can easily provide Workspace 365 with a custom branding. You can determine and adjust the colours, logo and product name, so that it matches your organisation.

Conditional access

Conditional access is a valuable tool to filter all the information someone has in their workspace and allows you to see only the relevant applications at the right time, based on location and device. This ensures that the workspace is organised, creates awareness, offers safety, improves the user experience and simplifies work.

Training

Then it is time to have the test group test the workspace. The test group can be trained by means of, for example, workshops or instruction videos. Above all, make it interactive and make sure that they perform a number of actions, so that they quickly become acquainted with the workspace. This is also a good way to check if all the connections and links work.

Get feedback and compiling FAQ

Give the test group a good place to leave their feedback, so that the workspace can be optimised based on that input. It is also valuable to have a session with the test group to discuss how the workspace can be optimised and how to enthuse the rest of the employees.

An FAQ can be drawn up on the basis of the information obtained from the test group. This can be placed in the workspace and used as an aid.

Optimising the workspace is an ongoing process, so stay in touch with the test group to keep receiving feedback.

Increase your online availability by, for example, communicating with the team on multiple platforms, such as via Yammer and Teams. Read more about the difference between the two and when to use which one here.

Before you go to step 4 of the process, it is wise to ask yourself the following questions. Are you still on schedule? Will the set goals be achieved? Does something need to be fine-tuned? After each step, consider carefully how you are doing and whether any adjustments need to be made.

After collecting and processing the feedback from the test group, it is time for the launch of the workspace. When launching the new digital workspace, it is important that you explain and clearly convey the value of the digital workspace for the organisation and employees.

Management can inform employees of the goals and benefits, how the workspace helps solve challenges, simplify work and enable them to work more flexibly.

This can be communicated in, for example, a video. The test group sets a good example and shows that change is positive. Their job is to help teams or departments to make optimal use of the new digital workspace and to answer questions.

Training

There are several ways to train the employees.

For example, workshops can be given to train employees in the use of the digital workspace. These sessions are interactive, so the employee clicks into their own digital workspace and there is room to ask questions and give feedback. During these workshops someone else should walk the floor to assist, to write down questions (for the FAQ) and collect feedback. The workspace can be optimised based on this feedback.

After the workshops, walk-the-floor days are also very useful. This is the presence of a Workspace 365 expert, who can give advice, answer individual questions and solve problems immediately. A weekly consultation hour via Teams, for example, is also very useful and easily accessible.

Workshops can also take place online. This can be done in classroom or webinar form. Increase your online presence and let the team feel this by, for example, regularly posting video messages. This lowers the threshold for the team to ask questions, give feedback, etc. You can also make your own instructional videos.

After the launch of the digital workspace, the process isn’t complete yet, you have to continuously improve the workspace based on input from the user groups, in order to achieve the reinforcement of the workspace among employees. Together with the Customer Success team, we look at whether the workspace is designed to meet the needs of your organisation and whether the goals have been achieved.

Evaluation and feedback processing FAQ

As mentioned earlier, making and maintaining a change successful is an ongoing process. Test groups play a key role in this, passing on the feedback they receive to further improve the workspace and to see where additional support and training is needed. The FAQ can also be supplemented with this information.

Aftercare days & extra workshops

It is also important to schedule aftercare days in which it can be discovered whether and which user groups need extra training / workshops. This session also gives the opportunity to discover additional features and benefits that can be added to the workspace. This can also increase usage. In this way, the new workspace can be constantly improved and the most possible can be made out of it.

In addition to these sessions, it can also be very valuable to create work groups, in which (different) persona groups can come together to get to know the workspace better and to help each other.

In addition to the fact that the aftercare days and workgroup sessions can take place online, the workspace also has features that can contribute to the online adoption process. Such as the Announcement Centre for communication within the organisation or a room with all information about the rollout of the digital workspace in the organisation. Read more about the best practices of these features here.

Finally, it is important to reward employees for their commitment and participation in this entire process. This could be in the form of a cake, but even a thank you can do a lot.

Review and evaluation

Even though the project is over, Customer Success is never "finished". It is good to discuss growth and renewal with each other in periodic meetings. This can be done once per quarter, for example. The workspace continues to develop and there are new features in almost every update. In order to keep the customer well informed of all new features and to keep a good overview of the customer value, it is therefore good to stay in touch with each other.