How to Get Your Staff to be Microsoft Office Pros
Getting your team to be more competent in using Microsoft Office has a wide range of benefits, from increased productivity to introducing more efficient ways of working. Providing training opportunities and enabling staff to learn new skills is also a good way to boost staff engagement, so there are plenty of reasons for investing time and resources into upskilling staff in Microsoft Office.
Here are some of the most effective ways to help staff to develop their MS Office skills:
Set targets based on using MS Office
By building MS Office use into targets and performance development objectives, staff will have a set goal to aim for. This could be to take an Excel course, learn how to use formulas, or to create a Powerpoint presentation incorporating relevant features to improve the quality and impact of the presentation content.
Peer-to-peer training
If you have someone on the team who has advanced MS Office skills, you could ask them if they would help to train other team members. They could do this as 1-2-1 training sessions, or could present a session to the team, whichever feels most relevant for your team and the type of skills being developed.
If there is nobody on the team who has advanced skills in any MS Office applications, you could set each person a task to learn a specific area of MS Office, that they will then provide a training session on for their peers. As well as helping to develop MS Office skills, this type of activity can also help to develop confidence and leadership qualities, as well as enhancing collaborative working across your team.
MS Office Courses
There is a huge selection of different MS Office training courses available for your staff to do. Some of the courses are available to take at a training location in a classroom environment, which enables the learner to get support from the trainer during the course.
Online courses have also become a popular way to do MS Office training. There are a lot of options too, from doing free bitesize sessions on one specific area of MS Office, to courses that offer a wide range of corporate training. You can choose one specific application that is the most relevant for the person’s job role, or enrol them onto training for the full suite of MS Office applications.
Keep using MS Office regularly
Once you have invested time and possibly money on training your staff on MS Office, it is very important that they continue to use the applications and variety of features on a regular basis so that they do not forget their newly acquired skills. You could schedule some personal development time out each month for your staff to work on any MS Office skills that they have not been able to use in their usual work tasks recently.
Set MS Office based work tasks
As well as building MS Office into objectives, you could also get into a regular routine of setting work tasks that must be completed using MS Office applications. For example, you could ask staff to create a Powerpoint presentation to display information that they would normally write in a short text report.
You can also start to delegate more MS Office related work to staff once they are skilled. If you produce management reports that are not automated, ask your staff to produce slides such as tables and graphs with the key management data in.
These are all very useful ways to help your staff to become Microsoft Office pros and once they start learning, you will soon see the benefits to the staff, to the business and also to the productivity levels of your team.
Author: Paul Gordon