When Planning Your Migration, Focus on Employee Productivity
There are many reason why an organization might be thinking about migrating to Microsoft 365. With an evergreen list of new features and capabilities, companies often reflect on the state and well-being of their existing investments, asking themselves whether a move to the newest version is necessary, or possible. Some common questions from executives to the teams and stakeholders who own and manage their various intranet, collaboration, email, and social tools and platforms is “How productive are our employees within our current systems?” and “How will this migration impact employee productivity?”
This can be a difficult question to answer. It doesn’t help that most organizations tend to focus on the technical deployment, but fail to think about the measurements of success, with productivity being one key measure.
Why should you focus on employee productivity?
- To simplify the collaboration interface
- To better align employee activities with the needs of the business
- To better streamline your business processes
- To get more out of your technology investments today, and going forward
The result of changing your focus to employee productivity is also a higher return on investment. For example, faster employee on-boarding and training, more business output, and stronger adoption and engagement — all of which means a faster realization of the financial investments you’ve already made.
When should you make the move to Microsoft 365?
The answer to that question really depends on the needs of your business. There are still many happy customers on the older versions of your workloads, such as SharePoint, who are only now considering an upgrade as Microsoft ends support (SharePoint 2010 end of life was in April 2021). While there’s a strong argument to move off of SP2010, if your 2013, 2016 or 2019 environments are meeting the needs of your employees and your business requirements, there may not be a need to immediately upgrade (Don’t tell Microsoft I said that).
However, if you are like a strong majority of companies that have slowly (or quickly) begun the transition to the cloud and Microsoft 365, you may want to consider starting your planning process.
At the end of the day, it’s not about the technology, but about the needs of your business. The best strategy for migration includes tight alignment of business outcomes to technology capability, and ample input from your employees.
Interested in learning more about AvePoint’s migration methodology? Join us for a webinar on September 30th at 2pm EST.
