Choosing and rolling a new piece of software to your company can be a daunting task. One of the biggest fears that leaders have is that the team won’t adopt the change. Frankly, those fears are warranted. People are typically resistant to new software solutions and the behavior changes that usually come with it. They don’t understand how valuable it can be to pursue technological advancements and the advantages they can give them.
Still, most enterprises understand the value of upgrading IT solutions and infrastructures in order to stay competitive and support business operations, but this doesn’t make it any easier for the users to adopt the newly rolled out software quickly.
Implementing a new software that will create a paradigm shift is a difficult task, however, with the right moves, it is possible to make the process quick and harmless for the business that is adopting it.
Regular Checkpoints with Leadership, Staff and Executives
Both you and the software provider (or an implementation partner) need to work together on making this process painless and short. If there is no cooperation on the either end, you won’t be able to achieve this and correctly implement the software within an organization.
This is why you need to make checkpoints together and create a plan that will outline what needs to be done on both ends in order to achieve the ultimate goal. Once you have done this, make sure that everyone involved tries to complete what is on their checklists in the agreed time.
Executives, leadership and staff can give you vital information that may help you to approach the situation differently, and they will also be able to make certain changes more quickly than you. This is why they need to be involved as well.
Monitor Behaviour
After rolling out a software solution to an enterprise, a certain number of employees will start using it instantly while others won’t. Those people that have started using it need to be monitored in some way. Why? Simply because there are many things you can learn from this. Consider where a team was before with the old software, or without any software and how they operate now when they have implemented a brand new solution.
When you understand where people are at the moment and how they use a software, you will be able to anticipate how they will resist the new implementation. Knowing how people are currently using the software will help you find out how it’s helping them, where it’s giving them troubles and what they lack in training or in their approach use the software properly.
Answering Questions
Naturally, when an enterprise adopts a new IT solution there will be many questions that employees will have about it. You must be ready to answer all of those questions very quickly and accurately.
After all, along with the tool usually comes things like new workflows, new responsibilities, roles, and how these things can utilize the new software solution you provided is essential. On top of that, explaining users functionalities, features and options that your software gives them is also important, so that they learn how to rely on it and make their jobs easier not more difficult.
Employees can get really frustrated when they reach a dead end and they don’t know how to do certain actions using a tool that is supposed to help them, and it is your obligation to support them with the right answers at the right time.
Frequent Communication
The transition period might last a while, and although it is important to be prepared at the start, it is also very important that you are constantly communicating with the enterprise including both the management and the employees. When the change has been made, the reaction of most people will be to resist it.
If you don’t communicate with employees, they might completely reject the new solutions and this could create a whole new spectrum of problems. This is why talking to people, asking their opinions, and engaging them on a somewhat personal level is going to help you learn more about their position and how you can improve on your end as well.
The initial opinions are very important because the whole company will grow into something greater from them. Talking about important issues and answering questions early on will clear everyone’s minds of any doubts they might be having and this is how you will make people be more open to using a software solution.
Create a Forum for Staff to Voice Issues and Frustrations
This incentive is deeply connected to the previous paragraph. Simply put, you cannot always have the option of talking to everyone within an enterprise, instead, you can provide them a place where they can all talk to each other about the new tool, share their experiences, the problems they are having with it, their concerns and so on.
Similarly like when talking to people directly, you can use the feedback that people have given to address their frustrations, issues and concerns. Create a community on the forum where everyone can give their input and where you can work together on adopting the software while giving employees all of the support and information they need to use it the right way.
Retraining Employees
In the end, if things are really bad and the change is simply too big or too quick and employees are unable to adapt to the newly implemented solution, you should consider retraining them. This might require making difficult decisions like forcing people to participate in mandatory training outside their regular work hours.
This is how you also might be able to find employees who didn’t know how to use the previous solutions properly or simply lack the knowledge they should have for the job. Bringing in help that is objective can help employees navigate through the program and overcome problems that they are having, without being judged by their peers who were able to catch on quickly.
Creating New Habits
The carrot can be a much more powerful motivator than the stick, particularly in driven and creative individuals, which is why you should use some type of employee incentive program to get people hooked on the new software. We prefer to use weekly incentives with our employees, and a few small rewards and bonuses for those who adapt to the new tools the fastest have proven to be a great strategy so far.
Once enough employees make it a habit to use the new software for their everyday tasks, and start seeing all the benefits, the positive attitude quickly spreads to the rest of the company.
In the end, it’s important that you are persistent and that you work on all of the things that we’ve mentioned above. This can be a difficult process that could require instant changes in approach, but it’s all about good communication and coordination. In spite of that fact that this might be a difficult road, it will reward the enterprise with a brand new software tool which will help them stay competitive.
OneMotion helps organizations choose and deploy software in a way that their teams will actually use it. Ever hear someone complain that ‘they’ve tried 10 different tools and none of them worked’? That’s usually a people problem, not a tool problem and we are all about fixing those people problems. Talk to us to find out more!