This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Yammer Blog articles.
You may have already read about Microsoft retiring Skype for Business Online in 2021.
One way that customers are successfully managing this transition is by using Yammer to support and communicate this change widely within their organization. Changing from one IT system to another is a daunting task and can create disruption and uncertainty throughout the organization. Luckily, Yammer can help.
A community approach
Using a community-based approach encourages your coworkers to help each other, solve problems, and share tips in a public way that benefits everyone. Having a community such as this to support one another also helps to ease the load on the IT department. Yammer is a great platform for this because you don't know who will be affected most by this change, where your best feedback might come from, or who else might be passionate enough to volunteer to participate in the change efforts with you... and Yammer makes it easy to find experts and share knowledge quickly.
Here’s a few of our best practices:
Create a specific community to support the change.
Create a group called New to Microsoft Teams where the community can post tips and tricks and additional training resources to get employees started. In the group’s description, encourage group members to ask questions, share their own tips, or share feedback about the change. Recruit Microsoft Teams super users to help monitor and share best practices within the group.
Encourage employees to use this space to ask questions.
Use common or frequently asked questions to create supporting content and documentation, and you can even create a crowdsourced knowledge base to help automate answering questions.
Share trips and tricks.
Create a #hashtag for tips and tricks that you can share about the transition and technology, for example #howtoTuesday. You can even create tips via GIFs to share.
Collect feedback.
Use a hashtag like #TeamsTransition to collect feedback. Maybe something is not working as intended or employees have suggestions for product or process improvement. Collecting ideas in a central place can help your project teams adjust and communicate as necessary.
Communicate the change.
Communicate the project status, progress, delays, timelines and expectations to the community to allow for engagement and involvement. Increasing your transparency will build trust and help employees understand what’s happening. Use a variety of Yammer groups and audiences or other communication channels to get the word out but point everyone back to the Yammer group dedicated to the rollout.
Host a live event and encourage Q&A.
You can invite stakeholders and ask the employees for questions. Examples of good questions to start: Why are we upgrading? How to get started? What are the benefits? Who else has done this before? What is the impact to our business? How have pilot users been taking advantage of Microsoft Teams? What success stories can we share already?
Once the transition is completed…
Continue to use the group to communicate new functionality, troubleshoot issues, share best practices, and capture success stories. Encourage your employees to share what’s working, what they still need, and pain points they’ve had during the switch.
For more ideas of using Yammer and Teams together, check out the blog post about using the Yammer tab in a Microsoft Teams channel. Or find out how the Microsoft Teams team uses Yammer.