“It’s all about choice.”
That, to Mark Bangerter, with Johnson & Johnson Technology, is the essence of how to effect positive transformation within the business. His goal, as director of user experience and organizational change management director for end user services at Johnson & Johnson (J&J), is “making sure that our business has the right choices to really drive the outcomes that they’re looking to achieve.”
As to what that means in terms of communications and collaboration, Bangerter joined me earlier this week for fireside chat during the Enterprise Connect virtual event,
Communications & Collaboration: 2024, to share J&J Technology’s strategy and his perspective on the future of the digital workplace. Choice bubbled up as a central theme.
For example, his team has a dual strategy for videoconferencing, since one tool can’t fit all the needs of such a broad-based organization, Bangerter said. It supports both Microsoft Teams and Zoom, each implemented over the last 12 months in a migration from Microsoft Skype for Business Online, he said. “We give people choice to make sure they can engage with their tools in the right way,” added Bangerter, noting that this is not about telling them they must use one or the other. Rather, they clearly explain why the change is needed, discuss the capabilities and benefits of each, and point out which use cases are most suitable for Teams and which are better for Zoom.
For example, Zoom can handle large meetings more effectively. “It’s often a little bit more straightforward for people to use, so that’s been a big upside for our senior leaders who don’t necessarily have so much time to be able to learn all the new tools and capabilities,” Bangerter said. On the other hand, Teams comes with the benefit of integration with the Office 365 or Microsoft 365 suites, which means people don’t have to jump in and out of apps but rather can do their work in one place, he said. By role, he added, Teams and Zoom give J&J “really good coverage across the organization.”
Further emphasizing the importance of choice, Bangerter shared that his “change management practice in theory is around really empowering our organization to make those decisions.”
This practice came into play for J&J’s migration from Skype for Business, Bangerter noted. While his team gave everybody all the tools and capabilities they would need to work through the change, it left the decision as to when to migrate during a set window of time and to which tool to the users themselves. That strategy appeared to pay off, as 95% of people had migrated by the deadline for switching off Skype for Business, he said.
Also telling about the efficacy of his change management methodology is that the helpdesk only received three tickets globally regarding the change, Bangerter said. “We make sure that we help and support and nurture people through change, as opposed to just sort of dictating ‘these are the dates you’ll move from this technology to another technology,’” he added. “That, for us, has been really, really key.”
On top of all this, the change journey must be super simple — no needing to click this and that, go here and there, or fill out this form and loads of others, Bangerter said. In the case of its Teams migration, his team prepared clear, targeted emails based on current use, and from those invited people to go to training to learn more or to proceed with the migration with “just the click of one big pink button,” he said. That click triggered the launch process, and “five minutes later those people were actually upgraded from Skype to Teams and their meetings migrated from one to the other,” he added. “We made it very much a flawless process,” and as such was able to minimize organizational pain.
In reflecting on the future communications and collaboration at J&J, Bangerter noted that much of the heavy lifting is done, given its migration into the cloud, first with Skype for Business and now with Teams and Zoom. So now, his group is concentrating on the key business outcomes these capabilities can drive and doing the research it takes to design the right combination of solutions to meet business needs, he said. Such solutions would likely enable more interactivity, and introduce new levels of automation, he said. Through 2024, Bangerter said, communications needs to become much more targeted. “You need to be more cognizant of where your partners are in their journeys and then help them and nourish them on that next step,” he added.
“Certainly from my perspective, gone are the days when you can just send out a blanket email across the organization saying we’re moving from this technology to that technology on this date,” Bangerter reiterated. “That’s not a very empathetic way of engaging with your business teams, and it doesn’t actually do companies much favor over the long term because those people become resistance to the new technology and change that’s happening.”
