3 key drivers of digital adoption

Business technology has improved dramatically over the past couple of decades. Traditional programs were complex, hard to use and not always very attractive to look at, either! However, user experiences have improved a lot, and interfaces like Microsoft 365, Salesforce or Google Drive are much easier for people to navigate around.

Nevertheless, digital adoption is never guaranteed – even with the latest and greatest technology. Let’s look at some of the barriers to people using modern business technology, then explore 3 key drivers to ensure adoption is a success.

Barriers to modern digital adoption

Even if a new enterprise technology has the most attractive, user-friendly interface, people will not automatically begin using it. Here are some of the main reasons why:

• Inertia: People prefer sticking to what they know
• Resistance to change: Employees dislike their business environment changing around them
• Not convinced: Staff may be unconvinced of the benefits of change
• Fear: Some fear that new technology may undermine their jobs or be ‘too difficult’
• Ineffective training: Ineffective training means many do not understand the tools

So, how do you overcome these challenges to digital adoption?

3 key drivers of digital adoption

If you have had disappointing user adoption results with a new platform, this can be frustrating. The good news is that you can still turn the ship around. The following 3 steps can be used at any time (although it is always preferable to implement them at the beginning of a migration).

1. Culture

Your organization must encourage a tech-conscious culture. Sustainable digital adoption depends on a shared way of doing things across the business. So, how does this work?

• First, everybody must understand the value of using new technology, and the organizational benefits of doing so.

• Encourage employees to attend webinars, seminars, and conventions relating to your digital tools and use cases, as well as your industry. The aim here is to help the workforce identify with and understand new technology and see how it can help them.
• Persuade team leaders and managers to include digital literacy in every employee’s performance expectations. Ensure that staff understand that your business prioritizes digital literacy and improvement.
• Ask your management team to lead from the front – if all staff see the CEO using new tools, they will get the message that digital is now part of company culture.

These efforts will be supercharged by modernizing your IT department so they have the skills, tools and responsibilities to support this wider cultural change.

2. Leadership

Achieving cohesive leadership in the pursuit of sustainable digital adoption is essential. Key executives must rise to this challenge.

To become a truly digital workplace, your organization needs leaders who understand the dynamics of the digital business world and are able to inspire colleagues to participate in new technology initiatives.

If they are serious about digital transformation, the organization’s leaders should:

• Take short training courses to ensure they understand the technology
• Keep up with industry thought leadership, research and findings
• Talk to employees to learn about ambitions, frustrations and opportunities to improve

3. Strategy

A final crucial driver of digital adoption is having an effective adoption strategy. At present, most businesses use the traditional training model for IT adoption where staff attend day-long training sessions in person. Unfortunately, this traditional approach to IT adoption just doesn’t meet most modern IT training needs.

However, this is where contextual microlearning can help. Contextual microlearning is an adoption strategy that provides short chunks of highly relevant training and information wherever the user is within a program. It provides short videos, walk-thrus, PDF guides and other content that is relevant to the page an individual is looking at.

This approach to user adoption has many benefits:

• It helps to continually train people with information made available whenever it is needed
• It further encourages a culture of learning and self-improvement
• It supports leaders to stay up to date with technology changes too

Make adoption permanent

The latest business technology is capable of supercharging employee productivity, boosting team collaboration, improving document management, and delivering excellent customer service. However, adoption will not happen automatically, so you must find ways to encourage that adoption and ensure you achieve ROI.

Digital transformation will happen when people adopt business technology. So, by using the 3 key drivers described above, you can make digital adoption an inherent part of the way your company works – today, and for years to come.