Ensuring digital adoption in digital transformation is critical for transformation efforts to deliver the expected outcomes.
With the goal of being future-ready and more competitive, many organizations are currently planning or undergoing digital transformation projects. Research shows that more than 70% of digital transformations fail, one of the common pitfalls for this, poor digital adoption.
What is Digital Adoption?
According to a Forbes article, digital adoption, quite simply, refers to “achieving a state within your company where all of your digital tools and assets are leveraged to the fullest extent”.
This will essentially allow you to get a full ROI (return on investment) on your technology investments as you will not only own the latest tools but actually, you’ll be using them to the fullest and maximizing their beneficial impact on your business operations.
This is not an easy goal to achieve. Throughout their lifecycle, digital transformation initiatives involve managing multiple elements like technologies, processes, departments, and people; making it really challenging for your workforce to keep up with everything that’s going on and adopt all the new changes and technologies.
Challenges of Digital Adoption in Digital Transformation
From the workforce’s perspective, the common obstacles for digital adoption can be:
- Complexity and/or quantity of new software. Sometimes business leaders are eager to bring in the best and latest tools in the market into their operations. But when there are too many of them, it could get confusing and difficult for your workforce to learn how to fully use all of the new software, especially if the new software is complex. On top of this, if employees need to continue using some previously-existing software, it can turn overwhelming.
- Poor training: With all the changes and new tools, companies need to define effective training and change management strategies to ensure digital adoption. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations still rely on traditional training methods that just don’t make the cut in the digital era and don’t’ address the needs of today’s workforce. Companies succeeding at this, are using Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS) like Whatfix, to improve digital adoption by providing.
- Poor communication or unclear goals. In order to reduce change resistance and accelerate digital adoption, organizations should ensure they clearly communicate the business goals of the digital transformation project, promote the benefits of change, set clear expectations, and establish communication channels for ongoing interaction.
- Role and processes change. Digital transformations are not only about adopting the latest technologies but also about transforming the way you do things. In order to have significant outcomes out of digital transformation, companies need to restructure some of their processes and functions, to make them efficient and enable them to make the most of new technologies. This directly impacts employees, as they might be required to change roles.
- Motivation. Employees are expected to accept the changes and follow along with the company’s digital transformation efforts, even if the changes (in processes, roles, and tools) don’t sit well with them. This could really impact their motivation to embrace the new ways.
Key Digital Adoption Strategies
Before buying a new software solution, take the necessary steps to prepare your employees for the change by:
- Educating your employees before go-live.
To achieve a smooth transition and digital adoption, employees need to know what digital changes are happening, why they are happening, and how these changes will make their jobs easier. - Investing in proper training and ongoing support.
Successful digital adoption requires to implement of modern training approaches and software solutions, like DAS, that can keep up with the training demands of complex business software and the digital age. - Train within the application.
Providing on-screen and in-app guidance while the employees are using the tool, is the best way your employees can learn how to use new software. - Provide contextual and personalized training to each user.
Employees need to be trained at the individual need level, based on their role, the features they will be using, their specific learning needs are, their preferred content formats, and in their native language. - Define a continuous training strategy
Keep your employees up to date with the latest features released on the software that you implement through ongoing training and support. - Track digital adoption progress
The only way to ensure digital adoption is to track the progress of your training efforts in its totality. DAS can provide useful insights on the features that are being used and how well they are being used by your employees, and the features that are underutilized or being avoided. Having access to this information makes it easier to identify problems, improve training effectiveness, understand what motivates users and find ways to boost user engagement.
Ensure Digital Adoption
Digital adoption is something that goes beyond IT and CIOs. Digital transformations affect every business function and require org-wide coordination and collaboration like never before.
Business leaders need to get hands-on in the implementation of digital adoption strategies to ensure buy-in from every single employee, including those working outside the company’s physical space, and shape their organizational culture into a digital one.
