How can companies encourage their employees to use the technology at their disposal?

How do we justify the investment (ROI) in new technology solutions if nobody uses them?

During part of my professional career I spent time trying to find answers to these questions. You can see here a video that I co-created in Avaya to try to get companies to start looking more carefully at this issue.

An organization should realize that changing the relationship between people and technology goes beyond a project well executed and needs a good dose of time, psychology and empathy. That is why it is imperative to make User Adoption part of a Project Charter right from the pre-sales phase to make sure that the technology selected is in line with user expectations. And by user, we mean, all type of user personas that make up a company DNA and not just a few…

About My Involment

So how do we approach User Adoption? We will follow a framework with defined key steps to prepare a solid plan with key milestones:

1. Understanding the Organization Culture, Communication and Collaboration objectives
2. Establishing the Current mode of working for the different user personas: “A day in a life of” (ie office worker, mobile worker, teleworker, product specialist etc..)
3. Defining the Future mode of working and the key functionalities needed to achieve it for the different profiles
4. Selecting the technology solutions that can deliver the key functionalities
5. Identifying the top KPIs that map to Business benefits and how to measure them
6. Creating a Communications plan taking into account all stakeholders
7. Adopting Kaizen: Continuous Improvement

By following this framework, we will make sure that users are involved from day one and feel part of the change process.  Only by clearly understanding the benefits the new solutions will bring, they will start using and adopting them.