Failing to communicate effectively with your employees won’t necessarily make your move to the cloud fail, but you could run into some serious trust issues. I would strongly suggest that you take the time to learn about and use some communication best practices when considering a move to the cloud.
Otherwise, you could see your workforce going rogue in protest at being kept in the dark.
Educate Your Employees About the Cloud
The level of education that your employees need depends on the type of move you’re making. If all you’re doing is moving your email service to the cloud, your employees probably don’t need anything other than a quick heads up to let them know when the move is taking place.
On the other hand, if a lot of your content is going to be moving off your premises and onto a cloud server, I recommend that you take the time to ensure your employees know exactly where their content is going to be living.
Explain what “the cloud” means and where their data actually ends up. This understanding will give your users a much greater appreciation of security issues related to cloud migration.
Teach Employees How to Log Into the Cloud
Users need to know how to consume the content they need once it moves to the cloud. When they access content stored on-premises, users interact only with a network behind your organization’s firewall. That means they haven’t faced issues with separate logins or multiple authentications, which they will need to handle when accessing content stored in the cloud.
Let your users know what to expect — and try to make logging into the cloud system as easy as possible, so it’s not a major headache for your users.
Train Users to Store and Share Content
As I’m sure you know, storing content in the cloud has many benefits. For example, content stored in the cloud doesn’t take up memory in your own server infrastructure. Even better, users can email links to content stored in the cloud to their co-workers, rather than sending the file as an attachment, which creates a copy of the file that takes up even more space in the internal server.
These aren’t necessarily benefits to the end user, but the result is that a massive load is taken off your IT department. If you want your organization to reap these benefits of the cloud, you’ll need to ensure that your users know how to share the content they need, as well as how and where to save it in the cloud.
Final Thought
Communicating with employees is the key to getting them to use your new cloud solutionefficiently and effectively. Giving training to help employees use the new cloud system is just the first step. Even once the initial transition to the cloud is complete, you must continue to support and engage with your end users. I’ve seen a lot of organizations provide training at first, but then they stop communicating, leaving employees feeling lost about how they should be using the new technology.
Not every employee has the same learning timeline, so it’s vital to keep communicating long after the initial move to the cloud. Yes, it’s a lengthy process, but trust me, it’s worth it.
