Mary Lou Theobald. I'm with Gannett. I've been with Gannett for 22 years in a variety of
positions. The last 20 or so I've managed the team that we'll call
Technology Learning Services and while it sounds like a training team, we do
user adoption, we do, we're really working on some digital workplace things. How do
we really impact the way people work? We talk about work, we talk
about the ways people work, but a lot of our work processes haven't adopted or
adapted to the modern workplace, sure, and how do we do that? How do we help
people work anyplace, anytime? You're the superheroes? Yes. The superheroes.
We started an initiative, it was actually when we first migrated to Office
365 within that first year, called Re-imagining Work and the whole notion
was how do we think about our work differently? Six years later I really
have come to shift that and I call it Renovate Work because we aren't at the
point where we can just think about work differently, we have to actually tear
down some walls and build new structures or figure out how we need to set up
structures and how we need to do that in a way that helps build our new work
processes. I will say, that is one of the things I really like about Teams. Is it
puts you in a place where you start interacting with people differently.
Obviously culture is a huge part of what you stand for as an organization, we also
talked to a lot of other organizations where they obviously are very clear that
this is a cultural conversation today but there's not the empowerment, I would
phrase it, that you've given teams where they can go in and there they have the
empowerment to go solve their problems. If you're talking to one of your peers,
and they don't have that set up, and I'm guessing that's something you built
twenty two years ago when you came onto the team, what advice would you give them
looking back to create that culture where we remove this constant concern
about support and governance, so to speak, and really allow people to empower and
create and solve their own challenges, have this accountability that we're
transferring if that makes sense? So part of the way I approach things is a three
prong approach when you're doing adoption. I call it embrace, engage, and
empower. The first stage is from a change management perspective. You just need to
get people to embrace the fact that you're gonna change them. So early,
often? Yes, that the communication is important. Here's what's going to happen,
here's why it's happening, here's why it's important to our company,
here's what it's going to benefit us. You do that and then when you move them,
or when you migrate them, or bring them over to using a tool, you know, and
for us it was migration from Skype to Teams, that we would put a lot of
emphasis around. Then you start getting them to engage in the new features.
Way, way back. When you're saying we're talking the features that were different from the previous powers, right?
Yes. So one of the things I do when I'm adopting, helping people
adopt the tools, I list everything that the old tool can do and everything that
the new tool can do. Then you start matching it up. It really, I call it project based training. Your following
a project management flow because that's really your gap analysis.
They used to be able to do this, now they can't. You have to teach that and train that
differently. Oh, we have something new, that's your, you know, your golden ticket if
you will. Those are the things that you really want to highlight. You know this
is going to take three clicks now, but but we're gonna give you so much more
over here. So you really start making that. When I talk about engage, its
how do we engage with the new tool? One of the tricky parts is you don't want
there to be too much time between embrace and engage. Because if I just say,
I'm gonna move you over here, you're gonna love it, you're gonna be
happy about it, they're gonna go and use their work processes the same way as before.
You start to get them to engage with a new tool and you
start to roll out, I did this with some people lately. We put them in
a team, let them start experimenting. Then within the team I said, by the way,
did you download the mobile app? Here are some things you can do.
Oh by the way... and you start introducing features and you bring them along. But
the real sweet spot, I was glad you mentioned the word empower, because,
that wasn't planned by the way, I know I know, you didn't see my notes. When you get to the point where you're
empowering people to change their work processes, that's when you really know
you've renovated work. You've really given them the opportunity to start
acting differently. That's so refreshing to hear your perspective on this, cause again
this comes up so often and everybody gets the culture aspect, but I'm not sure
it's really understood how critical that is to make it happen. So I'm really
honest with customers. I mean Teams is a different way of working, right? It's not
Skype 2.0. It is not an extension of email. It is a very different way of
working and you've got to change mindset. But when you do it the way you
all have done, it's amazing hearing your story at Gannett because
you're unleashing these incredible work teams. The other thing that I think is
really critical when you start looking at this, this is not an IT initiative.
I've heard you say that kind of thing before you hear everybody say that, but you can't just
think of it from the perspective of bits of bytes and you know turning on Teams
and whether or not you want it in island mode or whatever. You have to think about
it much more holistically. There are a lot of people that are corporate
communications and there are a lot of people who are HR specialists or
leaders and they're looking at how do we communicate and we need to step back
and stop thinking about our collaborative tools from the IT
perspective, but from the corporate communications and how do we
work and how do we think about our work? Which is much more than HR thing.
So I think when you start bringing those people into the conversation and if
you, you know, if you'r e thinking about this now and you haven't brought them in
it's really critical that you do that. I mean to summarize that thought, I mean you know,
you're done it for 22 years, your organization has embraced this
culture for such a long time there's a lot organizations who are a bit laggards,
are slower its lower along that adoption curve, so to speak, but what I find
really interesting is when customers start to get it, I've actually had some
verbatim tell me that Teams can actually become the bridge between IT
and the business and organizations where we've actually struggled with that
relationship. Because it's not about control in my mind, back to your point,
it's about empowerment and enablement, and again, there's nuances to every
industry, every organization, every geo so there'll be some governance and some
nuances again to the way that you support, but I'd love your
perspective. People like me, generally I consider myself a champion, but you need
that catalyst who is sometimes the person who is behind the scenes that you never
even know exists that's pushing the movement forward and I like to think of
the tool as the catalyst and when you allow the tool to be the catalyst, you
can be the person out front saying we need to do that, but the tool is what's
enabling underneath, it's enabling that ability to work differently and so when
you start to say they're the engine behind me, and I have an image, a graphic
that I use when I do presentations and it's this arrow and it's got somebody
standing up in front of the arrow kind of looking like you know, crossing the
Delaware or whatever, and they've got all these you know figures carrying the
carrying the arrow and if you think about that as the arrow being the tool
and being the catalyst, we're all there supporting it and you've got somebody there
helping to run that, that's when you really have that ability to start
empowering your work. I could geek out with you for hours. We wrestle
a lot with governance and I don't know that we have the ideal situation, but
right now we have it open. Everybody can create their own. I almost
got to a panic point a week or so ago somebody was asking me about something
and I said well here let me show you something in Teams, and while we were
talking he starting creating and it's like oh, maybe we've stepped two steps too far,
but it worked out beautifully. They created 19 private teams within. We've
got the general channel opened up. It was a way that they needed to invite
external users, and so we have all of these private channels where
people can upload their content and it's worked out really well. So why leave it
open, why, because obviously part of its an empowerment, but you know the most
common question we get asked is that's great I'd love everybody to do this, but
I'm concerned about who's gonna support these solutions afterwards and what if
we have a thousand teams created in a week? How did you get over
that? Sounds like you have the same concerns or at least you addressed those right? We had,
you know, we had SharePoint where we provisioned and then when groups came
along it's like, you guys realize people are creating their
own SharePoint groups you know, it's got a SharePoint site, and that took a
little bit of getting used to, but I think overall the mindset is what are we
trying to accomplish? And if you're really trying to accomplish a better
work process, removing that barrier, let me tell you on a Saturday, if there
is a breaking news event, do I want the whole weight of the company on my
shoulders for creating a team or creating a chat for them? No, I want them
to be able to do their work and do what they need to do. We put in some place,
you know, placeholders or some checks and balances where you can go through and
look to see if there's a team that hasn't been touched in a year and you
know you either try to notify the owner, if the owner isn't there anymore then,
you know, so we decided we'd rather deal with it on the back end and clean up
and do that kind of thing rather than be a barrier. I applaud it. Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that.