As your organization’s digital workplace evolves, your technology requirements also change rapidly. It’s easy for strategic leaders and vendors to get so excited about a new tool’s functionality that they fail to emphasize the technology’s benefits from a user perspective.
When you encounter employee resistance to a new technology implementation, that pushback often indicates that leadership hasn’t used effective change management to bring everyone on board.
Here are three change management tips for successful implementations in the digital workplace.
- Avoid a “Big Bang” rollout: When you attempt to roll out too many changes in your digital workplace at once, you risk overwhelming employees, not to mention your technical staff. This “Big Bang” approach to technology implementation tends to be difficult to manage, and could send your project off the rails.
- Invest in communication: Even when you have great technology design and implementation, it’s important to budget resources for communication during the rollout. Your communication plan doesn’t need to be elaborate. Start with building specific use cases for the technology and expand from there.One communication strategy to consider is to approach the project as an internal product rollout, in which your company is the consumer, and the technology implementation is the product that’s going to add value. This forces you to think in terms of “what’s in it for them”; in other words, to understand the value proposition from the user’s perspective.
- Provide mechanisms for feedback: If your users’ frustrations take too long to surface, they tend to fester and spread, affecting productivity and morale. The same is true if your company is slow to respond to these frustrations.
The best method for preventing this is to implement mechanisms that ensure users have a way to report frustrations and problems the moment they arise, and receive a timely response. Some situations may call for a dedicated hotline or an internal service desk. For others, a dedicated email inbox or input form may be sufficient.
The standard change management principles apply to the digital workplace and technology initiatives. Take a slow and steady approach, emphasizing education and value to employees. After all, if you want employees to change the way they work or specific behaviors, people need to understand how it benefits them.
Reach out to us to learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities.
