Making your team Tech Savvy: Simple ways to encourage technology adoption

Do you have a hard time managing all the “resistance to change” in your organization?

Many managers just like you, find it hard to incorporate any kind of changes in their organizations, especially, while introducing a new process or technology. Such resistance to change can become a major issue and more often than not, this results in huge losses.

So how do you minimize such resistance, or even better negate the same?

Here’s a thought, make the whole process of adoption systematic and comfortable for the staff. Such an approach ensures a smooth and successful transition. It can also save your company millions of dollars in the long run.

Here are some tips that can help you while incorporating technological changes in your organization –

Before adopting

• Do your homework – You need to make sure that the kind of technology you are looking to adopt is the right one and the best one for your organization. You need to do a thorough analysis of available options for that. You need to be well aware of the benefits it can bring and also how it will help your organization in the long run.
• Give your bosses a heads up if necessary – Sometimes your bosses may not be able to see the necessity to adopt the particular technology you are looking to adopt. You might have to put in some extra convincing efforts to make them support the adoption. So you will need to give them a heads up too, well ahead of the adoption. Support of the top management is very essential for technology adoption.
• Give your staff a heads up – If you let your staff know right from when you have plans of adopting new technology, they can be prepared. You should also let them know why you plan to do so. Make them aware of its benefits.
• Be sure to make everyone aware of not just the organizational benefits, but also personal benefits – Ok, let’s face it. People always do something they don’t want to do, only if they know it is going to benefit them in some way. Hence, if you need to convince your staff to adopt a particular technology, you need to address their personal concerns. You should show them how it can benefit them too.
• Test it on a group of people – Before actually adopting, you could choose a group of people and have them test the technology beforehand. You can use their feedback to assess the impact of the technology on the users. The more positive their feedback is, the more likely it is for the rest of the staff to adopt it readily.

After adopting

• Have fun training sessions – It is inevitable to provide training sessions of course, but if you make it fun, the staff will find it much more comfortable to use the technology. You can make your training sessions fun, by incorporating a little humour into your presentations or by having some lunch and learn sessions. You could even give out some rewards through tests.
• Engage experts – There might be some of those fast learners who get the hang of things pretty quickly. If you pick them out, you can have them help the others. It would be more comfortable for their friends to learn from them as well.
• Consider people who might need extra help – There might be people who might need an extra bit of personal help. You need to be available for one-on-one training sessions with them. Otherwise, they will hesitate in using the technology and may end up sticking to the old ways.
• Allow time for the transition – It is understandable that the people might take some time to get used to the new technology. You need to allow the time required for the transition and constantly monitor the use, to see if people are ok with it until it becomes routine.

Nowadays, technology is widely being used by almost every organization. Hence, it is important to know how to go about introducing a new kind of technology or incorporating changes to an existing technology. Technology is also constantly changing, which makes it all the more important to create an atmosphere to welcome change.