Belfius is one of the largest and best-known Belgian banks, with almost one in three Belgians as a customer. Belfius recently decided to switch to cloud-based communication and collaboration.

The hardest step in a project like this is often convincing employees and showing them the ropes. Belfius wanted not only for the new tools and techniques to be adopted, but also for people to understand why the change was happening and how it all fit together.

“The rollout of M365 at Belfius is part of the BeTeams program, a program built around 'Happy & productive employees in a hybrid workplace,'” says Kathleen Wouters, Program & Change Manager. “Our workplace has indeed become fundamentally hybrid, and as an employer we really want our employees to be happy and productive in their work.

The switch to M365 also fits within this program, because we're strongly convinced it can perfectly support the hybrid workplace and thus contribute to our program's goals. At least, provided our employees understand exactly what Microsoft 365 is, what its possibilities are, what value it can specifically bring them, and that they can use the tools correctly,” says Kathleen Wouters.

During an introductory course, employees got acquainted with the M365 cloud in general and with Teams in particular. However, broader topics were also covered, such as cloud storage (Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint) and collaboration tools (which you can integrate into your Teams).

Not everyone was immediately convinced of the new way of working. That's not surprising in itself — habits are, of course, not unlearned quickly. Fortunately, the increased efficiency of the new tools proves convincing. The expanded possibilities for remote work also represent an advantage for many employees.

Luc Engelen, M365 trainer at Xylos, is full of praise for the project and the collaboration: “The participants are eager to learn, positively critical, and leave the training enthusiastic, full of ideas about how to use the new cloud platform.”

“We set up a complete Change Plan around this, and chose Xylos as our partner for the training component,” explains Kathleen Wouters. “Xylos proved to be the perfect partner for that, especially thanks to their super enthusiastic and competent trainers. But also thanks to their insight into the bigger picture and our goals.

Together, for instance, we chose a training format that starts from 'collaborating with colleagues' and positions the various tools around that, rather than starting from the tools themselves — after all, a tool is not an end in itself.”

Kathleen Wouters sums it up: “It's a pleasure working with people who are at once highly professional, yet also very human. The service — flexibility, speed, organization, keeping to agreements — is truly top-notch!”