One of the key components to a successful Microsoft Teams Phone System deployment is undoubtedly a well-developed end user training plan. But what exactly should you be considering when planning your training campaign?
In this blog post Richard Lewis, Modern Workplace Training Lead for Symity, talks us through what he has found to be best practice when delivering user training during Microsoft Teams Phone System migrations.
The timing of training slots
When planning your Microsoft Teams Phone System end user training, it’s recommended that key training dates fall in to the Tuesday-Thursday range. But why?
During the many training campaigns that Symity has carried out, we have found that typically, Monday and Friday see lower training attendance rates overall when compared to other days of the week. This is because days either side of the weekend are generally more likely to be taken as annual leave.
So, if you want your training sessions to receive the best uptake, it may be better to stick to those mid-week dates.
Size of training team
Naturally, the size of your training team will depend largely on how many employees the organisation adopting the new system has.
If your training is to take place in a larger organisation, ideally you should be looking at gathering a training team of at least four dedicated trainers. However, if you are hoping to deliver all optional courses, it’s advised that you have six trainers as a minimum.
When it comes to the number of trainers at each session, it’s recommended that two are present at any one time. This will ensure you have one trainer dedicated to delivering the content, and a second trainer focussed on the live chat and Q&A app support during the session.
Campaign duration
How long your Microsoft Teams Phone System training campaign should run depends on several key factors, including business size, how many sessions the organisation would prefer staff to receive, and how long the technical deployment of the Teams Telephony will take to complete.
If you based training on 80,000 eligible attendees, and planned sessions for a maximum of 250 end users at a time to minimise any business continuity risk, it would be recommended to offer a total of 80 Teams Telephony sessions.
As well as this, 60 Teams Basics sessions should be considered as an additional essentials course, bringing the total number of training sessions for a campaign of this size to 140.
Training feedback
When planning and conducting training, it’s vital to consider user feedback at every step of the process.
Prior to the training sessions, you may want to ask users about their starting knowledge of the training subject. This can be done at the point of webinar sign up and will help you plan any additional training content that is required.
Gathering feedback after training is completed can also be vital in shaping ongoing course content and understanding the impact and success of individual sessions. This can be done via in-session polls, or by sending out online feedback forms to participants once the training has ended.
The collated user feedback can then be fed into an ongoing dashboard, allowing the project team to track how the training is being received.
Tracking attendance data
The final key component to a successful Microsoft Teams Phone System training campaign is to ensure you track attendance data.
Helpfully, the Microsoft Teams Webinar system provides the ability to track registration data, meaning you are able to see in advance how many users have signed up for each session. This allows the training team to tailor their communications leading up to the session in order to boost attendance numbers.
If you then combine registration data with actual session attendance data, you are able to track the drop off numbers and recommunicate with users as required.
And as with feedback, campaign data can be downloaded and fed into the ongoing project dashboard for reporting to the project team or steering group.
Richard Lewis
Training Lead
Symity