Work & Learn Agile with Microsoft 365

My five learnings from the Lernhacks Hacksathon

1. Learning with M365 does not mean learning M365.

M365 has become the home of agile, digital collaboration for many companies as a working environment. The advantages are obvious: the possibilities with M365 are incredible. Some participants reported on the ongoing or imminent introduction of M365 in their companies. Supporting employees with training that accompanies the rollout can be just as useful as reflecting from an HR and PE perspective at this point of the M365 journey not only on what employees and teams can do and need to know in order to work with M365, but also on how the environment can be set up with suitable content, tools and learning paths right from the start so that everyone learns how to use M365 and at the same time also realises that M365 itself offers opportunities as a learning platform in the future.

2. Learning can take place where the work takes place through M365.

The opportunity to think together conceptually and strategically about learning and working in M365 before the rollout should not be missed. In the long term, employees, teams and managers will benefit from the possibility, e.g. with MS PowerPoint, of creating good learning videos with just a few clicks from a presentation that would otherwise have to be held live, in order to then be able to watch, comment on, evaluate and share MS Stream learning videos directly in a channel.

In MS Teams, there is a SharePoint repository behind each channel: So why not define which new skills are necessary for the successful completion of a new project in the team right from the planning stage. And why not anchor learning routines in the team during the kick-off, so that people learn while they work?

3. M365 offers so many possibilities that HR and IT professionals need a precise picture of the prerequisites and needs of their own organisation.

M365 actually offers too many possibilities. Due to the abundance of functions that already come with MS Word, MS Excel, MS Stream or MS Planner, it is easy to lose the overview. HR professionals who accompany the introduction and further development of M365 for agile work processes, but also as a vehicle for developing a modern learning culture, are faced with the challenge of harmonising content-related didactic-methodical approaches with the technical infrastructure, data protection requirements and also existing processes, tools and platforms. It is therefore important to keep all relevant stakeholders and their needs in mind from the beginning and to view the work and learning process holistically from the employee's point of view in order to derive a clear strategy that everyone in the organisation believes in and supports.

4. Learning with M365 is efficient and can relieve HR budgets for training and workshops.

The integration of training and development offerings in M365 is obvious and should be considered immediately for one's own organisation. Microsoft is increasingly adding new functions that enable trainers and coaches to hold good webinars with MS Teams in video calls and suitable breakout rooms, and to work collaboratively on workshop results with MS Whiteboard, for example.

M365 cannot (yet) replace a classic Learning Management System, but it enables many new, creative ways of learning, e.g. with a learning diary in MS OneNote, and thus goes beyond an LMS. The increasingly comprehensive integration of M365 into the core processes and structures of an organisation therefore offers an ever better cost-benefit ratio, if one calculates, for example, the fast and efficient distribution of learning content. A lot of such content is available in the new M365 Learning Hacks Community.

5. Agile learning with M365 needs a strategic vision for the whole organisation, but should start with the individual employee if possible.

On the way to an agile organisation that uses the power of M365, there are many open questions to be clarified and obstacles to be cleared out of the way. Our Hacksathon also showed this. But for all participants, the motivating realisation that the opportunities to work and learn with M365 are worth the effort prevailed at the end. If all the brainstorming in the sessions, which were mainly done by learning professionals, one thing is not lost sight of: the individual employee who is not as inspired by learning as we and you, who are reading this.

The point is not only to bring employees along, but above all to enable them to learn naturally and on their own responsibility, also but not only with M365. Then M365 will unfold its full potential and go hand in hand with other great learning formats. And perhaps, said one participant at the end, we should start not talking about learning.