This article from BT outlines how focusing on user experience can drive productivity, better engagement and attract the best talent
Global organisations are looking at improving the way employees collaborate to drive productivity, better engagement and attract the best talent.
The collaboration market is going through continual transformation to support organisations with the right technology needed for the modern workplace. There’s a fundamental shift to cloud-based unified collaboration as a service, the increasing impact of analytics and AI and the need to balance the simplicity, convenience and freedom of choice employees have outside work with enterprise security requirements and the need for collaboration across larger, flexible teams.
In my experience, I also see deployments getting larger in terms of the number of users multinational organisations want to migrate to new platforms, as well as an increase in the number of organisations looking to achieve new collaboration tools like ‘teams’ or ‘group chat’.
Once organisations have got through the battle of selecting the right new technology and service for them and have enabled it within their infrastructure, they are still seeing major delays in being able to switch off incumbent services, fully migrate and achieve the desired benefits from their investment. This is due to the ‘people behaviour change’ challenge.
The IT team of a large consultancy I recently worked with was told that if one partner missed a call from a client, they would raise it as a loss of revenue that the IT team would be accountable for. Another organisation, a retailer, was looking to measure the success of the migration by the number of queries into the IT helpdesk complaining that they didn’t know of the change.
Time after time I see launch dates being pushed back and speak to IT teams nervous about making changes that impact people - not because the technology isn’t set-up, tested and ready but because of the ‘employee readiness’.
When dealing with changing the working habits of thousands of employees, simply sending an email won’t suffice. Indeed, our research has found that half of employees have collaboration tools but don’t know how to use them properly. Employees don’t like changing their working habits. And that means scopes are changing, projects scaled back and are ultimately failing.
Technology deployments are only going to be successful if organisations have their employees on their side. You need them to voluntarily embrace the new technology. Having a user adoption programme and overcoming user barriers becomes critical to a successful digital workplace journey.
That’s why we think collaboration technology should put people first, guiding their migration to the new service through adoption. This will show them how to use the technology, but it will also demonstrate the benefits it will bring to their in-life experience, helping them evolve with the technology.
If user experience is achieved, we can deliver three key outcomes at the same time; lower costs, improved collaboration and greater productivity, and better motivated employees. We have helped organisations achieve up to 80 per cent user adoption levels within four months.
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