10 Strategies for Boosting Workplace Adoption
Helpful tips and tactics to get more of your organization on board.
The most challenging part of rolling out a new tool to your company is getting everyone on board. That’s because changing people’s working habits isn’t easy, but those behavioral changes tend to pay off in big ways. With Workplace, high adoption and engagement can mean better access to knowledge and information, improved reach for your internal communications, and more opportunities to build relationships across teams and locations .
If you’re seeing low adoption of Workplace in your organization, we’re here to help. This guide outlines 10 key strategies to help you get more people active and engaged on Workplace.
1. Add Workplace to your onboarding process1. Add Workplace to your onboarding process
Embed Workplace in your organization’s existing onboarding process by:
- Sharing profile activation instructions with new employees on day one. For profile activation through access code instructions, click here.
- Engaging with new hires in a new employee onboarding group in Workplace.
- Storing onboarding materials in your Knowledge Library.
Want to learn more about using Workplace for employee onboarding? Check out this guide.
2. Get people managers on board2. Get people managers on board
People managers are incredibly influential—when they bring daily work into Workplace, their direct reports tend to follow suit. Educate people managers on the value Workplace can bring to their team. Here are a few key points you can share:
- Workplace is simple, familiar, and easy to use. This allows everyone on the team to participate in conversations, collaborate and stay up to date.
- Workplace allows teams to increase their visibility in the organization. Open team announcement groups such as “Marketing FYI” can help you share wins and proud moments with more people than ever before.
- Workplace enables both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Chat and video calling allow you to get answers fast and collaborate in real-time (synchronous). Posts are best used for communications that don’t require an immediate response and need to be easily discoverable days, weeks, and months down the line (asynchronous).
A great way to get more of your people managers on board is to create a closed or secret “People Managers at [Company Name]” group. Use the group to share management best practices, and encourage members to share their own insights and learnings with one another as posts.
To help people managers get started with Workplace, you can share the following resources:
- The People Manager Guide: Quick start guide for managers who are new to Workplace.
- Empowering Hybrid Teams: A downloadable toolkit with learnings from our research team and best practices for creating high performing hybrid teams (a mix of remote and in-person employees).
3. Send weekly reminders to unclaimed accounts
Send reminders to people who have been invited but have yet to activate their accounts. Here’s how to do it in Workplace:
- Navigate to the People page of the Admin Panel.
- Click on the … menu at the top right of your screen.
- Select Send Claim Notification.
- Choose whether you’d like to send a notification to all unclaimed accounts or send claim reminders to specific accounts using a CSV template.
- Personalize your invitation, focusing on the unique benefits Workplace can offer employees and the whole organization.
- Click Send.
You can also send reminders from leaders using mail merge. Claim reminders sent from organizational leaders are more likely to catch people’s attention than a typical Workplace invite. They also signal to everyone that the communication and engagement that takes place on Workplace is an organizational priority.
4. Use Plugins to share Workplace content to other tools4. Use Plugins to share Workplace content to other tools
Plugins allow admins to securely share Workplace posts or group feeds to other platforms such as SharePoint, internal websites and intranets. You can use them to improve the discoverability of important company updates and increase the reach of your content.
Workplace Plugins respect the privacy of the original content by only showing it to users who are logged in to Workplace in the same browser. This will encourage more people to log in to Workplace in order to view important content shared on other company channels. Learn more about Plugins in the Technical Resources.
5. Centralize company resources in your Knowledge Library
Make Workplace the central place for key company resources such as:
- Benefits, expenses, paid time off and travel policies
- Employee handbooks and onboarding materials
- Company mission, values and goals
- Resources for diversity and inclusion, health and wellbeing
- Team and department resources
Storing these resources in one place will save people time and reduce misinformation spread, but it will also allow more people to discover important company announcements, communications and community-building that are already taking place on Workplace. Learn more about Knowledge Library in the Knowledge Library Resource Hub.
6. Run friendly claims competitions
Organize team, department or regional claims competitions to incentivize profile activation. You can hand out prizes for the highest claim rates, such as catered lunches or gift cards.
- Go to Insights in the Admin Panel and navigate to the People tab.
- Scroll down to the People Across Workplace table and filter your results by location, department or role.
- Decide what kind of claims competition you’d like to have and what the winners will receive.
- Share contest rules, deadlines and incentives with managers. Be sure to include each location, team or department’s current claim rate and a compelling incentive to get claim rates over 80%.
- Follow up with leads to track success.
- Celebrate each team and share their successes.
Organizations also often use charity donations to incentivize profile activation. For example, for every profile activated, the organization will donate $1 to an important cause.
7. Bring common workflows into Workplace7. Bring common workflows into Workplace
Create groups for repetitive workflows that can take place in Workplace. Here are a few ideas:
- An HR Q&A group or IT Helpdesk group: To allow employees to quickly find answers to their questions.
- Facilities group: To quickly and efficiently report equipment and facilities issues.
- Shift cover group: To allow frontline employees to request coverage or pick up available shifts. Learn more about Shift Cover in the Help Center.
You can use bots to automate repetitive tasks and workflows directly from Workplace. For example, the Workplace Zendesk bot from Azuronaut allows people to create and receive updates for their IT support tickets from both Workplace Groups and Workplace Chat.
Content sharing integrations are another great way to get more people to engage with one another in Workplace. They allow teams to pull files from tools like SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and more, and to share them in Workplace with group members who have access. You can explore all available integrations in the integrations directory.
8. Run live Q&A sessions with company leaders
Q&As provide employees with a unique opportunity to ask questions and interact directly with their leadership team. For that reason, they’re a very popular strategy for engaging employees and bringing them into Workplace.
With Live video, all you need is a phone or computer to broadcast to everyone in the entire company. Host a quick Q&A session with the CEO, or bring together a whole panel including external guests. Here’s some inspiration from 5 Workplace customers who have used Live video to drive employee engagement.
You can find everything you need to know about running an internal event using Live video in Workplace in the Live Video Resource Hub.
9. Add visual reminders to workspaces
Choose from a variety of posters, one-pagers and other print media to promote Workplace to all employees. See all available promotional materials here.
10. Try these IT hacks10. Try these IT hacks
Your IT team can help get more people on board by making changes to company-managed devices. Here are a few ideas:
- Make Workplace the default home screen on web browsers.
- Change users’ desktop backgrounds and add promotional Workplace screensavers to all computers.
- Add Workplace to the Office 365 Launcher.
- Install the Workplace Chat app on all company managed-machines using our MSI. Learn more in the Technical Resources.
Driving Workplace adoption takes time, and there are many other strategies outside of the ones listed here that could work for your organization. Check out available resources here in the Customer Resource Center to discover new ways that you and your users can make the most out of Workplace. Here are just a few you can draw from:
- Culture Carrier Toolkit: Celebrate the people in your organization who embody your values and champion your culture with this downloadable campaign kit.
- Executive Visibility & Accessibility: When leadership teams are engaged, they set the tone for engagement across your organization. Learn how they can use Workplace to model transparency and build company culture.
- Live Town Hall Playbook: Download this comprehensive PDF guide with everything you need to run a town hall event using Live video in Workplace.
