4 Steps for Helping Your Employees Adapt to New Technology

Every time an IT vendor tries to sell you a new product or service, they’ll tell you how it will increase sales, improve efficiency, save money and introduce a host of other benefits to your business. What they often don’t talk about, however, is how your employees and existing systems will adapt to the new technology.

Onboarding employees with new technology is often a complicated process that you may be tempted to put off, but this doesn’t pass in the fast-moving world of IT. If you want to keep your business moving forward, you’re going to need to take an innovative approach.

#1. Choose the Right Technology

The first and most important step of making new technology work with your company is to ensure that it aligns with your specific goals. That means you need to work with an IT team, either in-house or outsourced, that is fully aware of your specific goals and objectives and is able to help you make the transition as seamlessly as possible.

Say, for example, you’re planning to move away from spreadsheets and implement a customer relationship management (CRM) platform instead. Most likely, one of your main goals will be widespread adoption across the organization, in which case you’ll want to prioritize user-friendliness, perhaps even at the expense of functionality.

#2. Build an Implementation Roadmap

Choosing and implementing new technology on nothing more than a whim is asking for trouble, even if you feel completely confident that your employees will be quick to pick up on the new system. That’s why you can’t expect to implement a new system overnight and instead need a carefully thought-out migration plan.

By building an implementation roadmap, you’ll be able to ensure that no important data gets lost while being transferred to the new system. At the same time, your team will have a chance to familiarize themselves with the new platform before they need to start relying on it for everyday use.

#3. Create a Culture of Learning and Motivation

User experience is easily the most important factor when it comes to ensuring that a new tool is successfully implemented in your organization. Since people will naturally gravitate to what they’re familiar with, you’ll need to make the adoption of any new technology a fun and engaging process that involves everyone on your team.

Employees who can recognize the benefits of a new technological implementation, even if they aren’t at all familiar with it to start with, will at least be motivated to learn. That’s why you need to provide relevant training and build a culture of progression and innovation that keeps your team, like your business, moving with the times.

#4. Listen to Feedback and Adjust

You cannot simply expect employees to be receptive to new technologies if they feel they have no say in how you implement them. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to include your employees in the initial decision in the first place. After all, they’re the ones who are going to be using the new platform as part of their day-to-day routines.

With hands-on training, engaging workshops and regular meetings and seminars, you’ll empower your employees in the decision-making process. This way, you’ll also be able to continuously improve your business processes by making adjustments based on the goals of your company and the needs of your employees.

Every business needs modern technology to maintain its competitive edge, but it’s rarely easy to navigate the minefield that is enterprise IT alone. By partnering with Spectrumwise, you’ll be able to make technology work for rather than against you. Contact us today if you’re ready to make IT worries a thing of the past.

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