Increasingly SYKE is being asked to run virtual tours of Office 365 for in-house legal teams, to help them understand what is available at their fingertips and how the individual elements complement one another.
First things first, to save any blushes I won’t be naming any names. But needless to say, more and more in-house legal teams are approaching us as legal tech experts and asking for training on how to use Office 365.
Despite Microsoft’s global dominance (in its most recent earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said Office 365 has 180 million commercial users, up from 155 million a year earlier) it would appear many users (*ahem myself included) aren’t really using the suite of apps to their full effect.
In fact, I’d go one step further and say, a huge number of people don’t even realise the various applications they’ve grown up with (Word in particular) are real time collaboration tools.
Perhaps we’ve simply grown used to posting one another static documents via email – with a distant nod to the past when photocopied memos would go back and forth across an organisation with marked up amends in different coloured pens. Yes, some of us are old enough to remember those halcyon days.
Or we’ve been caught out or stung by tracking changes, then forgetting someone outside of the organisation can go back and see what you started out with before they received the polished version.
Either way, whether we’re stuck in time, still getting over a work faux pas, or simply reluctant to change, it’s clear for all to see that internal departments, project teams, or colleagues keen to sort the Christmas party out must adopt the full suite of tools at their disposal. Otherwise they risk pointless duplication of effort working on multiple versions of the same document and hours of wasted time trawling through email chains chasing the point of a conversation you’ve mainly missed because you were out at lunch.
Don’t even get me started on What’s App – the default fast messaging service on most of our mobile phones. Without wishing to worry you, if you’re using it to discuss work – you’re not only breaking their terms of use, you’re probably breaching GDPR, IT security protocols and, were all that not enough to be getting on with – it’s also a really rubbish place to store work chat should one of you leave the organisation or change phones. Hmm.
What’s more the relatively seamless ability within Office 365 to save your work to the cloud (One Drive), enable groups of work colleagues to communicate more effectively than email alone (via Teams), and the pretty sophisticated collaboration functionality across its major tools (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), means it’s a no brainer really.
Which of course begs the question why are so few people using it already?
Humans are notoriously habitual creatures. We follow the occasion fad, sometimes like to be in the cool crowd. Yet we continuously find ingenious ways to cut corners, while paradoxically seeking out the route of least resistance.
But it’s also true a very large number of us are simply resistant to change. We stick with what we know. We might trial a new tool or thing, but it’s actually hard to get us to shift our behaviour.
