You understand that leveraging technology to transform and accelerate your business requires a dedication to change from everyone. Change might entail initiating a new business process, implementing a cloud-based system, or involve overhauling your entire communications infrastructure.
Perhaps you pitch the ideas to your team, hoping to get them on board, but early excitement is quickly followed by objections and resistance. Without real support, change can seem virtually impossible; putting the sustainability of your business at risk. How can your business help its employees to embrace change seeing it for how it will benefit people and the business rather than as a threat?
User adoption is one of the key metrics for success when it comes to introducing new technology. The importance of winning the hearts and minds of your users cannot be underestimated.
What makes users resistant to change?
Fear of Incompetence. If employees feel that they will not be able to master, learn or adapt to the change that is being proposed, there will inevitably be resistance. This fear often manifests with technology that seems complex or too technical to manage.
Fear of Being Replaced
The introduction of digital solutions can cause employees to think that their skills are no longer relevant even when the change is introduced with the express intention to enhance or further develop their existing capacity.
Fear of Losing Value
Emerging technology and the automation of traditionally manual business systems and processes can reduce the amount of control and influence an employee holds within the organisation. If control is threatened in any way, resistance becomes the instinctive response.
Fear of the Unknown
With change comes uncertainty. If users are not engaged in the change management process from the outset, they wont understand the business imperative that created the need for change. User adoption can be improved if you can avoid the “I don’t know what was wrong with the old system” question.
What can you do to manage change and user adoption?
Technology solutions go together with change. So it’s critical to partner with an organisation that understands that change is hard, and its implementation requires leadership.
Change management must extend beyond project management and into “people” change management. Take the time to understand and consciously mitigate the impact and risk that comes with change.
Establish a clearly defined strategy for your change project or program. Make sure you engage with stakeholders across the business. If customers and suppliers are going to be impacted by the change, make sure you seek input from them too.
Set clear objectives and include key milestones so everyone can see how the project is progressing. Create a roadmap for success that includes not just what needs to be done, but when and by whom.
How can we help?
At Fuse, we know that achieving great outcomes for our customers is as much about asking the right questions of all stakeholders before things get going, as it is about giving orders and pushing the right buttons on the day.
It’s not just about the app working but taking a moment to walk in the shoes of the end user ensuring that organisational processes and the structure that surrounds it, is fit for purpose.
