It’s important to understand clients’ business needs and pair them with the appropriate communication technology solutions. The technology is never the whole story, however. To ensure the best possible return on investment, it’s crucial to secure widespread adoption across your organization. Good advice for any company is to:
Get employees involved early
Introducing your people to the value and benefits of new technologies early in the process is key. It’s important that you involve the team itself in coming to the decision that this new technology is a good idea, and it’s important that you have people that are going to champion the technology for you. The goal is to ensure that employees are engaged. If your people don’t understand the value of the technology, don’t have the same vision that you do, and don’t buy into it, it doesn’t matter how much investment you put into technology; technology that is not wanted is not going to reap the benefits that you were hoping for. In fact, it will probably push things backwards and make people less productive.
Make the case for your solution
If you just make employees use a new technology without offering them the chance to weigh in on it, it will have a huge impact in terms of how the team members themselves want to adopt the technology and the value that they see it bringing to the organization.
At Genesis Integration, when we work with clients we’ll typically try to meet with somebody at a higher level to explain the vision and the technology and value of the solution we are proposing. After that we’ll work with different user groups at other levels within the company to ensure that the value is there and help communicate the benefit of the technology.
There are a couple of different ways of introducing new technology to employees. The first is identifying or explaining how technology could resolve an existing pain point. The other is to simply introduce the technology itself and let the user’s imagination connect the dots of how it could help the business.
Provide adoption training
Employee training and adoption is absolutely essential when introducing new technology. Account executives must take a look at the business cases in more detail from the eyes of different users and different roles in an organization. It’s important when you talk about new technology to the user that you understand how it’s going to potentially fit into their business and their lives, and if they’re going to be open and receptive to working with it, because as much as the technologies offer benefits, if a client doesn’t see the value in that technology or those benefits, it’s not going to help at all and their adoption’s going to be very low.
Ensure that new technology is deployed in bite-sized pieces so people really get a chance to work with it, understand it, and see the benefits. Training is crucial for ensuring your solution actually does get adopted and is utilized.
Every project starts with a business need, which motivates our client to invest in communication technology. The goal is typically to increase or enhance productivity, but what that means in practice is different from business to business. What doesn’t change is the importance of helping employees embrace whatever new technology is being contemplated. Never take for granted that employees will be engaged by the solution; you may need to lead them to sharing your enthusiasm.
