As we have written before Technology Adoption is crucial in support any organization’s digital transformation journey. Still though the majority of IT Teams spending a lot of hard work, huge budgets and time managing this change fall short of their goals by poor end user adoption of the technologies they are introducing. Regardless of what anyone might say, you can provide employees with the best software available but if nobody is using them these software are a wasted investment.
There are a number of key mistakes that we have observed in technology adoption programs IT Teams run. We will highlight the top 3 and give some recommendations on how you can avoid them.
A lot of the time IT Teams introduce new technologies that doesn’t add a lot of value to employees which results in resistance to using the new software. If you acquire quality software that has a clear and profound impact on the employee’s work, adoption would happen on it’s own. Make sure whenever you are considering acquiring or building new solutions to consult with your users and see if this solution really adds a lot of value and benefit to them before proceeding.
Regardless of how much time anfd effort you put in implementing or developing a new solution, users who are accustomed to old platforms will not shift easily. Every IT Team should solve this by ensuring they issue quality documentation, provide a mixture of trainings (Classrom, Online, Video on Demand, Tutorials) and build software socialization activities to smooth the adoption process.
IT Teams think that employees will easily pick up new technology once launch, but even if the software is an improvement of what they had, they will slowly start drifting back to the old software because they are used to it. User needs time to learn the ins-and-outs of the software they use, and if they don’t have a firm grip on the functionality, they won't use it on a daily basis. Keep educating them not only during the launch phase, and make it easy for them to access information and help when they need it.
In every company regardless how hard you try there will be a group of employees that will resist any new piece of technology. The traditional approach with them was to avoid them and forget about them focusing on the other employees. This is wrong, since once the other employees see that they are still doing work the old way they will start drifting back and refusing the new changes. Instead of neglecting them use them as test subjects early on, give them beta access, listen to them and see how they might help you improve your software. If they turn from resistors to early adopters it will make your adoption plan much easier.
If there is an ideological rift within the business when it comes to new software implementation, more issues will present themselves as the project progresses or, worse yet, user adoption efforts may flat-out fail. The best approach is to keep a constant pulse on stakeholder opinions, sparking up macro-level conversations as often as possible. By discussing and debating the biggest issues in a project, stakeholders are encouraged to create a unified plan based on the most important question at hand: What's the best way to win user adoption with this project?
Technology adoption isn’t about events, training and announcements only. It is a systematic approach to aimed at understanding user needs, showing them how you will be helping them meet their objectives, removing their restraints, training them and continuously supporting during your transformation journey. What most companies fail to see is that employee adoption is a core of their digital transformation journey, without their users having the best software in the world won't be enough to give them the edge they are seeking.
Ta7awul is a suite of products and services that we have built to support organizations increase employee adoption and consumption of new and existing technology solutions.