Organizations can no longer survive without IT. If you’re a startup company, you might depend on Microsoft Office Suite to help you with word and data processing. Microsoft Excel might be the main application to manage your finances. If you’re an SME, you would probably be using more sophisticated tools for CRM, accounting and other areas of your business. As you grow into an enterprise, you would probably have more applications than your employees know about. The bigger your organization, the harder it is to roll out new IT solutions company wide. This challenge is true across all industries, even for IT companies.
When you acquire a new IT solution, your goal could be increasing your team’s productivity, improving your processes & making your day-to-day tasks smoother, or even improve communication between your team members. Whatever your goal was, it’s always in your company’s best interest. So imagine your disappointment when you finally implement the solution for your team and you find out that very few people are using it.
But why is it that we get very few users to use new solutions even though it’s for their benefit?
Considering that the solution is already up and running, low user adoption can be narrowed down to 4 major reasons.
Users are categorized into 5 main groups:
If you launch any IT solution, you’re first users are likely to be innovators; tech savvy individuals who want to try everything new in technology. Followed by the early adopters, who love to try new technologies but cautiously and not dive in head first like the innovators. You are most likely to put the majority of your efforts to convert the rest of the groups. They are not interested in trying something new nor in learning how to use it. Therefore, you need to spend lots of time to convince them of the value your solution adds to them and how it will change their lives.
“The new what? We have that? I didn’t know.”
Here’s the problem with medium and large enterprises; the more people you have, the more difficult it is to get everyone informed. Often, upper management decides to acquire a new solution, and mid management knows about it and lower level management as well as the rest of the employees are in the dark. The same thing applies in matrix organizations; one or more groups knows about the solution and the rest are in the dark. So before you start blaming the solution or the employees for the low adoption your solution got, ask yourself “Do they know about it?”
This is another big challenge in user adoption. When an employee does not know how the new performance management solution benefits them, they are highly unlikely to use it. Business owners of the solution (not necessarily the IT department) should always focus on showing the employee the value this solution adds to them. They should also clarify how it relates to the employee’s specific function. For example, this solution guarantees to save 20% of the time you spend on creating and following up with HR requests. This way, your employees will not only understand it, but also be invested in it.
Learning to use a new software is not always an easy thing to do. Employers and IT departments often overlook the importance of training their employees on how to use new software. Training is the main enablement activity that encourages the user to adopt a new software. Management should spend 40% of its efforts in training their employees. Training doesn’t even have to be in a specific location, it could be an online training, a prerecorded training session, or even video tutorials that the user can watch on their time.
To launch your new solution internally in the most successful way, you need to keep those challenges in mind to overcome them. Once you do, you’re going to notice a god increase in the number of users and in utilization. Remember, quick user adoption means quick return on investment and more visibility on your efforts.
If you want to know more about Technology Adoption and to overcome the challenges mentioned above, download the TAP framework.