How To Bring A Technological Change In Your Organization
Today, every other company wishes to adopt technological change as it has become crucial for organizations. It dictates how well you respond to the external environment and marks your position in the intense competition of existing markets. Therefore, it is inevitable to bring a technological change to your organization.
Employees are generally reluctant to change. They do not readily welcome any change in their work routine. The main reason is that most employees rely on the complementary skill set for the existing organizational requirements.
However, organizational success depends on how well it responds to external pressures. This external environment is constantly changing and posing new challenges. Your organization can only cope up with these pressures if it undergoes the necessary changes. Employees might resist despite their capacity to accept changes. It mainly depends on how well the leadership and the higher management deals with the entire change management process.
Today, every other company wishes to adopt technological change as it has become crucial for organizations. It dictates how well you respond to the external environment and marks your position in the intense competition of existing markets. Therefore, it is inevitable to bring a technological change to your organization.
If you have been struggling to do so, this article can provide you some beneficial insights. It mentions five ways that can help you to bring a technological change to your organization.
Hire a Professional IT Support Team
Embracing new and advanced technology is not easy for everyone. Some of your employees will be more tech-savvy than others. A considerable majority will require constant support to deal with routine issues. It further determines the success of your organization in adopting technological change. Your IT support system must be influential enough to make employees accept the technology-based innovations.
It is best to hire some great IT specialists who can help you develop tech skills among your employees. These experts may further guide your teams regarding the dos and don’ts of innovative technological tools.
However, you can always seek help through online search engines if you don’t know any reliable IT specialist in your locality. Just type the relevant text along with your city name, such as ‘best IT Support in Chesterfield’ to get the top-rated results. According to Transparency Market Research, the overall market size of IT help desk services will reach $11 billion by 2023. It shows how organizations are utilizing supporting services to help their employees adapt to the new technology.
Train Your Employees
You cannot expect a commercial pilot to fly fighter jets without proper training. Though both the technologies are from the same industry, still, relevant training is required to generate the desired output. Similarly, you cannot implement technological change without uplifting the skill set of your workforce. You will need to involve your learning and development department to introduce organizational-level training programs.
We’re not saying that you need to train them on all the specifics of the technology that you’re introducing as this would be far too much information to take in. For example, you don’t need to train them on the battery tabs for lithium-ion batteries that might be on the device or anything about how the device was made. All they need to know is how it works, and how to operate it correctly. Don’t try to overcomplicate things thinking that it will help as it will likely have the opposite effect.
These training and development activities will equip your employees with the right talent to manage technological change. According to Statista, the global organizational expenditure on employee training was a whopping $370 billion in 2019. Training for technology makes a huge part of this expense. Employees will feel value addition in their skills and they are more likely to change quickly. You can actually incentivize them by providing training certifications. They will happily learn the technology and accept it in their usual work environment.
Share Valuable Insights with Your Team
Involving employees in the organizational development processes develops a sense of responsibility related to the entire work process. It would encourage them to participate with higher management to solve problems and share insights on the best options. Once they become part of this process, the resistance to change radically reduces. Employees tend to accept technology not by compulsion but by their own choice. It then helps your organization to create a healthy work culture.
Employee engagement and workplace involvement provide useful insights to the decision-makers. Since employees are practicing technology on practical grounds, they can analyze it better. Once they are a part of the change process, leadership can gain useful input from employees. The overall decision-making process becomes efficient. Moreover, you will get numerous technological options that you might not even have considered before. Therefore, the best decision is always the outcome of a synergized effort of both employees and leadership.
Set Realistic Examples
You cannot expect employees to actively participate in online video conferences when the managers themselves are hesitant to use Zoom. Technology acceptance always follows a trickle-down approach. The leadership and higher management must showcase exemplary behavior. They should be the ones to accept technology first. Employees will then readily follow in the footsteps of leadership.
A technological leader understands the tech needs of an organization and initiates a top-down approach. Here the leadership accepts technology among different hierarchical levels. It is always better to bring a change through examples than just verbal compulsion. For instance, the Indonesian mining company Petrosea went through a digital transformation in 2018. The CEO and other leaders were the first to adopt technological changes to perform their routine tasks orientation. It resulted in a huge success, and now the entire organization has incorporated AI, smart sensors, and machine learning in their processes. They reduced employee resistance to change by creating an organizational culture through leadership. Once the leadership incorporates technology in their work routines, employees feel more empowered to do so.
Launch Pilot Projects
Pilot projects mean selecting a smaller segment of the organization and introducing new technology to them. It provides essential information about how the technology actually impacts real work situations. It mitigates the risk of failing on large-scale implementation. It provides you a safe environment to observe how employees will react to the new technology. It also helps you to understand employee perception. You can then design better strategies to introduce the change to other segments of the organization accordingly.
Pilot projects also bring glitches to your notice so you can improve the technology for better organizational processes. As mentioned earlier, it helps you to set up your tech support system as well. This way, you’ll be aware of the aspects where employees will need support. You can prepare for it beforehand. The improved version of organizational-level implementation then faces reduced resistance because it has already become employee-friendly.
Final Thoughts
Introducing change is easy but making the employees accept it is difficult. You might be able to make them accept the technology by force. Conversely, you can never generate the right productivity out of that technology unless employees are intrinsically motivated to accept it.
You must always keep in mind the ‘can do vs. will do’ dilemma. Employees might say that they ‘can’ function properly with technology, but ‘will they actually do? You never know for sure. Therefore, you must take a strategic approach and incentivize employees to accept the technological change positively.