9 Steps of Migrating to a New Employee Experience Platform

If you’ve already done your research and decided which employee experience platform (EXP) to migrate to, you may be asking yourself, ‘what now?’

(Is the Confused Travolta GIF now playing in anyone else’s head? …Just me?)

Migrating to a new tool, whether it’s an EXP or otherwise, can be daunting. You might not know where to start. You probably don’t know what to expect. You may have inaccurate assumptions.

To help you feel more prepared, we’ve laid out the steps of a typical platform migration process below. 

1. Setting your business objectives and priorities

As with any project that impacts your employees, it’s key to be clear on your goals from the outset. The areas you’ll need to sort in terms of priority for your migration process include:

• How quickly you want to launch your new EXP
• How much or little training you’re okay with
• How you want employees to engage with your new EXP (Primarily for critical comms? Or for recognition and bonding too?)

Aligning on these categories and more early on will help you refine what content you pre-load onto your EXP before opening it up to employees – more on that later!

2. Mapping your timelines

You might be flexible in how long your migration process takes, or you may be under pressure to get your new EXP live as soon as possible.

It’s important to be crystal clear on this from the start of the project. Not only will it give you a better idea of expectations and accountability, it also means you’ll choose the right EXP partner – some platforms take longer than others to set up and roll out, while others (like Workvivo! We’re not biased at all!) can tailor onboarding and implementation packages to cater to tight deadlines.

3. Content and data inventory

Migrating to a new platform is a great opportunity to do a little spring cleaning! But before you start throwing things in the junk pile, invest time in taking stock.

Whichever tool you’ve been using up to this point, you’ll undoubtedly have stored information on it. That could be anything from important policy documents and PTO instructions to leadership podcasts and video recordings of town halls.

The most reliable way of making sure nothing gets lost that shouldn’t is to know exactly what you have and where you have it. That can be as simple as setting up a spreadsheet with different tabs dedicated to categories, Marie Kondo-style, like HR Documents, Team Photos, and more.

4. Auditing your content

Now, on to that spring cleaning we mentioned. Since you’ve put the work into documenting every piece of content that exists on your legacy platform, you’re all set up to go through it with a red pen.

Bring in the right stakeholders in various departments to help make decisions on what you should migrate and what you should lose. You don’t want to delete something another team uses just because it doesn’t spark joy for you! (Yes, we’re having a Marie Kondo moment.)

These are the kinds of questions you and your colleagues should ask when determining what stays and what goes.

• Is this content accurate and up to date?
• When was the last time this content was opened or downloaded?
• Does this content still align with our organization’s goal, culture, values, and vision?
• Is there an obvious place this content will be stored on our new platform?
• Does this content contain enough information, or are supporting docs needed?

5. Migrating your content

Once you’ve finalized what needs to be migrated over, it’s time to – that’s right – ask yourself yet more questions.

• How it will be transferred or recreated? Is it a case of downloading documents to a secure folder and reuploading them to the new platform? 
• Who will migrate it? Will we assign a task force to copy over a certain amount of content per day?
• What areas of content should the task force prioritize? 
• What’s the deadline for migrating our content across?
• Where will each piece of content live on our new platform? Will employees be able to find it easily?*

*Side note: With the right EXP, one that’s intuitive and built with the user in mind, this should be covered!

We have advice and a lovely content migration checklist from expert contributor Cat DiStasio for you to use when working through this part of your project. Check it out here!

6. Building your user journeys

Like we said, your EXP migration is a great opportunity to clear out some clutter. That doesn’t just apply to content – it’s also a chance to improve your employees’ experiences by rethinking their user journeys!

For example, maybe your legacy tool meant that frontline employees, like those working in a warehouse or driving delivery trucks, had to spend time they didn’t have trawling through irrelevant and overwhelming resources.

With your shiny new EXP, you could house all your frontline-specific documentation in one place, like a Frontline Space, to keep everything tidy and accessible. If your company is big enough, it might even be worth breaking this part of your EXP down further into user personas, like Warehouse Staff, Delivery Drivers, and more.

Something to remember here is that you shouldn’t just assume what employees want to change, or how they want their journeys to evolve; your best bet is to do some internal user research to deduce what exactly they want from their new EXP and to refine your user journeys accordingly.

Ideally, you’ll also involve employees themselves in the journey mapping. You can host workshops that invite people to share what their go-to interaction with your EXP to find a certain document would be, for example.

The outcome is a significantly better chance of genuine employee engagement. 

7. Engaging your people + launching your new platform

You shouldn’t wait until the last minute to plan how you’ll engage your employees with your new EXP – it should be a priority from the start. If nobody knows about it, your launch is probably going to be pretty anti-climactic!

And when it comes to the actual implementation, consider whether you want to do a soft launch or dive into a full rollout. 
Soft launch: A pilot phase with a small group of users before a full rollout to
Full rollout: Launch your new tool to all users. Make sure you’ve built up some content for the activity feed already, so that people feel at home as soon as they log in!

Either way, it’s crucial that you (and your EXP’s customer support team) are available to support and encourage people to get involved with their new digital home.

For more advice and some great ideas around engaging your people with your new EXP, check out expert contributor Caitlin Kirwan’s tips here.

8. Training

If training employees on how to use your new EXP is one of your requirements, you’ll need to have your plan, materials, and supporting assets ready to go before you launch.

Typical training materials can include:

• User guides and video tutorials
• Training sessions for different groups 
• Evergreen supporting documents that live on your EXP
• Setting up an online support portal, if necessary

Part of this step also means assigning user roles. Will each of your departments have a super-admin, for example, to democratize how your EXP is managed and maintained? Will you need a dedicated IT person to oversee how people use the platform?

Of course, you can always choose an EXP that has minimal training and IT personnel requirements. (Like Workvivo. Did we already mention we’re definitely not biased?)

That will take the pressure off this aspect of the migration, and also help your people start engaging as soon as they jump in. 

9. Measuring for migrational success (and beyond)

To gauge how successful your migration has been, consider these key areas:

• Feedback from employees via polls, surveys, and informal conversations. An EXP that promotes open comms is crucial here. You should ask employees how the new tool has impacted their working life, how easy or difficult it’s been to adjust and to find what they need, and more. 
• The platform’s performance metrics. Have there been periods of downtime, for example? Have you had to invest time in installing updates?
• Employee engagement with your EXP. Are people sharing posts or reacting to those from their colleagues? Have comments started to pick up?

While your migration project may have an end date, the ongoing success of your EXP won’t. An EXP should be your partner for the long haul, not a quick fix that fills the gap of your legacy tool.

That’s why choosing a platform that covers your needs, is built by a team passionate about the future of employee experience, can scale with you, and that your people genuinely enjoy using is key.

Consider migrating to Workvivo

We’re Meta’s only preferred migration partner for its Workplace customers. Learn more about migrating to Workvivo or book a free demo!