When a SharePoint portal comes into a company’s life, it is to reach several goals: to facilitate business processes, to help employees with their day-to-day routine, to support collaboration and to promote corporate values.
But it can happen, despite all the efforts, that no one will show any interest in the new system, leaving it unused for months and months. Let’s look at some possible reasons of users’ reluctance to understand how to change the trend.
Why they refuse
First of all, the implementation of a new system creates multiple psychological barriers that can result in software rejection. For example, your employees are used to manage their tasks by other means (i.e. via email, Skype, face-to-face meetings), so they perceive the portal only as their management’s new whim to follow the automation fashion. Other employees can be hostile because they don’t want to learn using one more system and regard the portal as a new time-eater.
In addition, a SharePoint portal does need a new corporate collaboration psychology to be adopted by the employees. As the core activities (e.g. workflow management, document processing, cross-departmental communication) will now have to be carried via the portal, this will need a new mass consciousness.
Looking deeper into the problem of SharePoint rejection, other reasons can be found in the heart of the portal itself. A poor SharePoint UI, an inconvenient navigation, the lack of fresh content – all this can hurdle user acceptance.
Though it’s hard to foresee all the problems before the implementation, it’s still possible to improve the situation.
When to react
As soon as the first signs of the portal rejection appear, you have to react. There is no time to reassure yourself that the portal will at least serve to manage workflows or to store documents, while collaboration is not very important. Actually, it is collaboration that ensures the portal’s vitality, so once it’s gone, the portal will be quickly transformed into a plain document storeroom, or, at worse, into a browser bookmark.
To add more, the portal rejection means that the battle for the highest productivity is lost and employees will have to stay with their old working style full of Excel sheets, papers, and meetings. And that’s for sure not the goal of SharePoint portal implementation, which is meant to achieve much brighter results as in the example of this SharePoint intranet developed for more than 45,000 employees for use on a day-to-day basis.
What to improve
There are several aspects that can be improved in order to ensure SharePoint users’ loyalty.
To prevent rejection, dedicated trainings can be organized to show the platform functionality and to convince your employees that the new portal is not their enemy but a helpful tool for them to be more efficient and productive.
Content and user experience are two other aspects to work on in order to enhance the relationship between users and your SharePoint portal.
Are you content with your content?
The content is vital for any SharePoint portal. This is what will keep your audience engaged, but there are two fundamental questions that arise: what content should be published and how to get it?
You can always start with your company’s news. Sharing that helps to promote corporate values, strengthen the sense of community and involve every staff member into the company’s life. You can delegate this responsibility to your HR and PR/marketing departments to enrich the corporate newsfeed with relevant information.
The next step is to engage your employees in content generation. The portal should provide employees with tools to share their knowledge and encourage the interest of their colleagues. Here, psychological bonuses include growing their influence, getting valuable feedback and acquiring peers’ acknowledgment through the portal.
Whatever the content source, the portal should be regularly updated. Only this will make employees interested and will trigger their collaboration.
What about UX?
A poor SharePoint user experience heavily influences its acceptance. A portal with a slow response time and unfriendly design will give you little chances to win users’ engagement. This is the case when SharePoint consultants can help to enhance SharePoint UX by working on the following components.
Attractive SharePoint UI. Let’s be honest, the out-of-the-box SharePoint interface is not enough to engage your employees. Luckily, the SharePoint UI is highly customizable, so the portal can be designed in compliance with the modern web trends and your requirements.
Better Response Time. Ideally, your portal pages should be rendered in less than a second. Slow response can be caused by server overloads, slow network connections among servers or just poorly designed pages with a large number of Web Parts that send multiple server requests. A comprehensive diagnosis of specific pages, servers and network connections, server hardware and software configuration is what will help to bring the response time up to the standard.
Handy SharePoint Add-ins. To extend the functionality of your SharePoint portal, you are welcome to use multiple add-ins. SharePoint add-ins run on the SharePoint server with no custom code and allow to solve specific business tasks (e.g. to easily handle workflows) or to provide your employees with useful information (e.g. their colleagues birthdays, the office plan, etc.).
Engaging Sites. People love working in personalized workspaces. SharePoint gives the opportunity to customize different types of sites, according to employees’ tastes and activities.
- Personal Sites are created to become a single location for each employee to manage documents and content, to fill in personal details (expertise, projects, interests, etc.) and connect with colleagues.
- Department Sites help departments to consolidate their core activities in a dedicated place without mixing them with those of other departments.
- Work Group Sites are the collaboration spaces that unite employees involved into the same project, activity or sharing the same interest.
User-Friendly Mobile Version. Employees use their smartphones everywhere, and they will be disappointed not to find the full functionality the portal on their mobile devices. The mobile version shouldn’t be inferior to the desktop one. The more functional it is, the more chances there are that your portal will be used and appreciated. At the same time, your portal should be well adapted to the most popular mobile browsers (Safari, Chrome Mobile, Android Browser, IE and Blackberry Browser) in order to enable employees to access the system whichever browser they use.
Conclusion
Implementation of a SharePoint portal can dash against unexpected difficulties. This is the case when software for software’s sake development can result in the portal rejection by its very own users. A personalized approach and high-level customization of the portal by SharePoint consultants can help you overcome both psychological and technical barriers. Just a bit of extra efforts, and your portal will likely become a welcomed tool that facilitates collaboration between departments, encourages internal communication and streamlines business processes.
This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.