plans is not having a well-defined and articulated adoption plan in the first place. According to digital adoption leaders surveyed by the HBR Advisory Council, 50 percent cited “not having a well-defined digital adoption strategy” as among the top three obstacles to successful digital adoption – more than legacy systems (38 percent), insufficient expertise (30 percent) and poor leadership (26 percent). Digital adoption can involve learning curves, changing firmly established habits and psychological hurdles, said HBR Analytic researchers. Organizations must establish and communicate clear and concise purposes for encouraging employees to embrace a new technology so they are assured it will be worth their effort. “Companies can get stuck when leaders don’t make a compelling case for why the change of technology was needed in the first place,” said Tim Creasey, chief innovation officer at change management firm Prosci. Organizations need to demonstrate both the value to employees of embracing new technologies, as well as the business outcomes they wish to achieve from a digital adoption strategy, said HBR researchers. Currently, leaders are particularly focused on a workforce’s output, suggest the findings, especially given the pace of change and the pandemic’s acceleration of digital transformation. According to the study, increased employee productivity ranks among top favorable outcomes, according to 67 percent of leaders in the survey. Other much soughtafter objectives among leaders include enhanced organizational agility (55 percent), greater crossfunctional collaboration (45 percent), improved employee experience (44 percent) and improved innovation (25 percent). “Successfully improving the performance of the organization is a really huge part of setting the right mindset for driving change,” added Creasey. In some cases, driving change may require more drastic measures, advised John Coles, a senior manager at Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company in San Antonio, Texas. “Companies often have legacy infrastructure that employees prefer, which can cause adoption of new tools to drag on and on,” he told HBR Analytic. In such circumstances, the best plan of attack, he continued, could be to simply “kill some of your old applications” by phasing them out. Make it Easy or Train Them Making sure employee-facing tools are easy to use is another way organizations can encourage adoption, said HBR Analytic. According to the survey, the increasing complexity of technology solutions is one of the technology factors most likely to negatively impact employee experience. Thirty-nine percent of executives, for example, said their employees find enterprise resource planning systems difficult to use, while 29 percent of respondents believe employees struggle to use human capital management systems, and a full quarter of execu28 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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