It’s long been noted that change is the only true constant in marketplace. All around the world, in every industry and every geography, every business’s first challenge is simply to adapt.

It’s a challenge felt not only at the corporate level but the individual one too — employees at every organization are continually challenged to master new tools, new systems, and new techniques for boosting productivity.

Yet even when the benefits are clear, many organizations still find their employees hesitant to adopt new technologies.

Technology Adoption Needs Leaders

Recently the Harvard Business Review shared insights from Capgemini’s Didier Bonnet, on just what it takes to encourage employees to adopt new tools and strategies in the workplace.

Dr. Bonnet notes that while many organizations are investing in new technologies, few are experiencing a sustained change in how employees get work done. Typically, he comments, this is not due to a failure of a given tool to live up to its promise, but to a general unwillingness among workers to give up the tried and proven ways of doing things — even in the face of better options.

As a result, Bonnet concludes, organizations need to plan for managing user adoption right from the beginning of any procurement process. He offers a five-point plan for organizations seeking to integrate any new technology:

• “Do fewer things better”
  Every new tool represents a new challenge to your employees, demanding they trade in the processes they know for something foreign. This is what makes point solutions especially problematic — not only do employees need to learn a new way of doing things, but now they need to learn 2 or 3 or more disconnected steps to achieve a single outcome. Better to task your team to learn one single, comprehensive tool.
• “Plan and budget for adoption from the start”
  Organizations are littered with new programs that never quite took off. Peek inside any business and you’ll likely find a wiki managed and used only by the team responsible for it, or new company-wide software only touched by 3 members of a single team. The value of any new tool might seem obvious to you, but most of your employees will need to be shown how and why they should make the switch.
• “Lead by example”
  Parents hear the same advice every spring: the easiest way to get your family to wear their bicycle helmets is for you to wear yours. That same idea holds in thousands of other places — including the office. When employees see managers and executives using new tools, adoption tends to follow.
• “Engage true believers”
  One of our first clients relayed the story to us — all it took to convince every technical expert in their organization to begin using Panopto was for the first member of the team to try it out. It’s the classic adoption curve — most people want to watch the early adopters try something out before they take the plunge. To encourage adoption, businesses need to find those early adopters, help make sure they succeed — and then help them tell their peers.
• “Align rewards and recognition”
  Too many organizations let new technologies fail simply due to “Rewarding A and hoping for B.” Adopting a new tool or system, however intuitive and productive, will naturally require some learning. Employees who are measured on their short-term production rates are often unwilling to sacrifice their existing productivity without certainty of future improvements (and sometimes, not even then) — make sure you recognize and facilitate (and ideally, reward) that learning curve to allow the employees to feel comfortable taking time to learn something new.

 

Helping Your Team Adopt Video in the Workplace

As desktop video adoption passes from the early adopters now to the majority of businesses, some organizations aren’t quite sure how to help employees pick up the technology. This is completely understandable — after all, only a decade ago video at work was strictly the domain of the AV experts.

Today, however, video has become pervasive thanks to a wave of easy, accessible tools and a raft of new opportunities to use video in our personal lives. At Panopto, we’re dedicated to making adoption easy:

• Our video platform is a single, holistic tool that supports all aspects of video, from recording and live broadcasting to storing, searching, and sharing all in one place
• We enabling your team to capture video from any recording device — so they can use the same smartphone camera at work to record meeting summaries or demonstrate best practices as they do at home to record anything else they may share on YouTube or Vine.

As a video company, we can also speak first-hand to the potential value of video as a training tool to support new user adoption. We welcome every new Panopto customer with a series of simple introduction and how-to videos, readily searchable and shareable in each new video library. These videos can be shared as part of adoption programs, and can even help to support true believers as they dive in and get started. See how we help our customers encourage employee adoption, in just one of our introductory videos below.

 

 

Find out more!
Learn more about how Panopto help you bring desktop video to your organization — by making video easy, integrating with your existing content, security, and conferencing systems, and offering dedicated support and program planning consultants that can help you get started on the right foot. Contact our team today for a free trial.