3 Steps to Success When Adopting New Technologies in Your Workplace
In most organizations, change is often met with resistance—especially when it comes to adopting new technologies. These three steps can help make any technological transition easier.
By LeeJay Stewart | Summer 2023
Change, whether personal or professional, tends to make us hesitant. Think of how you felt when buying a new house, starting a new job, or welcoming a new child or pet into your life. The feelings felt when organizational changes within the workplace occur are often no different. Organizational changes are commonly met with anxiety, resistance, and even fear. But there’s one type of change that causes an especially dramatic cultural disruption in any workplace—technological. It could be a switch from Oracle Sales CRM to SalesForce, Office to Office 365, or Office to Google Suite. No matter the upgrade, or how significant or subtle, introducing a new technology of any kind into an organization will always have an impact.
Of course, the challenge for today’s leaders is to make sure that the impact felt by their employees is a positive one. To do that, organizations must understand the people, processes, culture, and ability of their employees to digest change. With that degree of understanding, the adaptation of new technology for positive change will be eminently doable.
Here are three steps to ensure your organization can successfully adopt a new technology and create a lasting, positive impact.
1. PREPARE YOUR EMPLOYEES
Whenever bringing a new technology into an organization, the focus must be on the process and should consider the people being required to utilize it. When you ask people to accept, implement, or make changes, you first must help them understand how that change will impact them personally. Until they can understand how the change will influence their position, well-being, and/or livelihood, it’ll be difficult to get and keep them on board. An employee can be affected adversely by the introduction of new technology, so even if the process is theoretically improved, that improvement depends on employee buy-in. Fortunately, there are ways to increase the likelihood of employee buy-in:
- Making sure that affected employees have input into the change process.
- Considering employees’ individual roles, their experience, and their level of comfort with the digital environment.
- Clearly explaining how the new technology will benefit the company—and them.
- Ensuring the technology training is thorough and effective, and that employees are ready to use it on day one.
- Establishing a readily available internal support structure, even after the technology has “settled in.” Remember, new tech is new tech. Not everyone will achieve proficiency right away.
2. CHANGE PROCESS AND INCUMBENT PROCESSES
How well does your organization understand the internal processes that it’s utilizing today? Are they documented, or are employees just doing things by rote? Understanding how things are being done today is critical to determining what needs to be improved or replaced and retained and/or enhanced. This is where the first step of preparing your employees comes back in. By involving employees early on, the likelihood of success increases. Additionally, it gives your organization a chance to identify “champions” in individual departments. Leveraging key influencers will magnify your message. These champions’ enthusiasm very often becomes contagious, and later, they’ll be able to mentor their colleagues who may need additional help with the new technology. Understanding the incumbent process is vital to building an effective change process. It also gives your organization a chance to evaluate existing processes and, with user input, find the technologies that make them smoother and faster.
3. BRING IN THE NEW TECHNOLOGY
Ironically, technology is the last step to consider. Once the people and the processes have been analyzed and understood, you can start to identify the specific technology you want to adopt. Here are a few things to consider:
- Remember your why. Make sure everyone is aware that there’s a problem and that change is necessary to fix it.
- Communicate to the people that’ll be impacted (as robustly as possible). This is important to do to the technology users and the people that are involved in each part of the adoption process alike. Everyone who the change will touch in anyway needs to be in the loop of what’s going on and why. If you don’t explain the reason for your change, your chances of avoiding employee resistance will decrease exponentially.
- Identify the champions. As previously mentioned, these aren’t the typical IT people. These are the people in, and owners of, the business process. When identifying change champions, consider individuals who are respected and trusted throughout the organization. The ideal change champion will have influence and will be sought out for insights, direction, and information. Once you’ve chosen your champions, dedicate time to communicating and working with them, collecting their feedback, etc. Of course, you won’t be able to incorporate all their ideas, but you can address their concerns about the change and make them feel heard—and like the other employees, you’ll want to give these champions the why (or why not).
- Utilize HR. If the change could result in lost jobs, it’s imperative to bring HR in to avoid any wrongdoing. They’re the pros, and they can generally handle human change management better than, for example, IT. And whenever there’s a personnel reduction, there’s always the chance of litigation.
A final key point to consider is that the new technology you’re planning to adopt should be making everything in your firm or organization operate better and more efficiently. For example, it should be automating manual processes that are error-prone and redundant, increasing the velocity of all internal and external processes, enabling the organization to scale easily when needed, or increasing revenue and profit. Of course, a learning curve needs to be expected, but your new technology should ultimately make the jobs of employees easier.
If given a choice, most people choose what’s termed “the path of least resistance” (i.e., keeping the status quo and doing what’s always been done). That’s why technological changes can’t be optional. For any organization to reach its full potential, it must have everyone on the same page. Leadership should set a cut-off date to implement the new technology (provided no extension has been granted), and when that date arrives, it’s out with the old and in with the new for everyone—no exceptions.
Whether in business or in life, change is constant. The business environment is changing faster every day, and those who don’t keep up risk obsolescence. In the accounting and finance profession, change is necessary. But just as lack of change can doom an organization, fumbling the introduction of change into your workplace culture can also be harmful (if not fatal).
LeeJay Stewart is the CEO and managing director of StratusComm - Managed IT Services.
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