In the quest to stay competitive, more and more companies are pursuing ambitious digital transformations that promise to deliver automation, efficiency, and scalability — and that will change the way they operate. But it’s crucial to realize that technology by itself won’t deliver the anticipated benefits. People are at the core of the success or failure of every transformation. In fact, according to the consulting firm McKinsey, “70% of all enterprise change initiatives fail because of employee resistance and lack of management support.”
In a digital era, changes are rapid and happen at scale. While businesses work hard to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving world, it becomes mandatory to focus on the human factors of change so that their investments don’t fail. A failed user adoption strategy will generate costs and damage productivity; it may impact revenues. And it will certainly frustrate employees and increase their resistance to change, which means it will take longer time for organizations to realize the benefits of their transformation and change. Every digital transformation initiative must consider the impact on employees and actively engage with them.
Here’s the key question: How can the enterprise successfully manage large-scale changes in ways that drive long-term adoption and benefits realization? The short answer is this: Develop a human-centric design for managing change, one that wins the hearts and minds of employees. Meet people where they are today and guide them through their change journey. And embed the necessary behavior changes throughout the employee’s experience.
Lessons Learned
Wipro’s experience in change management has provided three answers to the challenge of driving sustainable changes within the enterprise.
- Communication is vitally important: When technological changes are announced and begin to be implemented, the unfamiliarity that accompanies them can be very unsettling for employees charged with learning and using new systems. Communication is the primary solution to this challenge.
Change-related employee communication should focus on awareness, transparency, and authenticity. Communications should address the rationale behind the change. The “why,” for example, could be that change is essential to modernizing the business or fostering competitiveness. Communications should answer the “WIIFM?” (What’s in it for me?) question. It’s vital to customize communications based on each employee’s, or team’s, level of involvement in the change and how they will be affected. Communications should also make clear what won’t change going forward.
Key messages should be reinforced through multiple communication channels and by leadership. Communication can help employees understand and internalize the changes to come and help calm resistant behavior. Finally, true communication is two-way communication. Provide a two-way feedback loop to give employees a voice in what’s happening.
- Adopt the right approach to training: Meaningful, timely training interventions are critical to the success of any technology change. Employees have a wide variety of learning styles, so it’s important to structure courses in ways that provide a safe, engaging, and productive learning experience for everyone. Training should not be rushed; too much speed can lead to cognitive overload for learners and adversely affect their ability to retain new knowledge. When creating learning content for new technology, organizations need to make sure they support different learning preferences while allowing employees to independently practice with the software.
- Use technology to make change happen: The purpose of any technology change is to maximize business outcomes by increasing employee productivity. It’s critical for employees who are the ultimate drivers of change to have the right digital tools to do their jobs. Without the right technology, it can get hard for employees to embrace change that can affect their daily work and work lives. For instance, organizations are investing in digital adoption solutions that help ease the new technology adoption process with reduced onboarding time and support queries. Providing users with a better adoption experience helps tackle the resistance to change.
The Digital Adoption Solution
The best way to design and implement effective change management strategies is to use digital adoption solutions that can drive the process from initial transformation to full adoption. For software-related changes, digital adoption platforms provide the vital support employees need to make the switch.
Since 2018, Wipro has partnered with Whatfix to apply its powerful digital adoption platform to the challenge of introducing new platforms and ways of working to employees. Whatfix offers offering employee onboarding support and ongoing training to fill a significant gap in digital change management.
Whatfix is an interactive digital adoption platform that fills a significant gap in digital change management by offering employee onboarding support and ongoing training with customized walkthroughs and contextual guidance throughout the product.
- Whatfix’s interactive walkthroughs help companies speed up the switch to new software. This change management-focused training tool walks users through each process in the new technology through personalized onboarding and instructional programs.
- Contextual step-by-step training allows users to learn in the flow of work, which results in improved productivity throughout the shift to new software.
- To track user progress, Whatfix also provides built-in analytics, which helps measure the usage of the guided walkthroughs across multiple touchpoints on the applications.
Working together, Wipro and Whatfix help enterprises achieve their change management goals by successfully deploying a digital adoption platform on top of any software environment to enable quick and seamless onboarding, personalized training, and increased user adoption.
Click here to learn about how we partnered with Whatfix to help one of our customers to increase user adoption and business efficiency.
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