Maximizing Technology Investments: The Importance of a User Adoption Assessment

Technology plays a crucial role in driving efficiency, innovation, and growth. However, the true value of technology investments extends beyond mere acquisition and implementation. It hinges on how effectively these technologies are adopted, understood, and utilized to drive day to day business decisions across the organization.

According to the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, more than 90% of surveyed business leaders believe that using technology to improve work outcomes and team performance is very important to their organization’s success. Despite this, only 22% believe their organizations are adequately prepared to harness technology to achieve these goals. This alarming disparity underscores a significant readiness gap prevalent in many organizations.

Closing this readiness gap requires the establishment and deployment of a robust user adoption philosophy. Such a process entails more than just introducing new technologies; it involves a comprehensive strategy aimed at ensuring that employees embrace, understand, and effectively utilize these tools in their day-to-day activities. This approach is less of a “build it and they will come” methodology, and instead should focus on changing the depth and organizational approach to end user engagement.

In this blog, we will explore the six signs that your organization needs a user adoption assessment. We will also uncover how a user adoption assessment can help your organization maximize the effectiveness of your technology investments. By addressing the readiness gap through a structured assessment of user adoption, you can unlock the full potential of your technology, driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage.

Understanding the Challenge: 6 Signs You Need a User Adoption Assessment

1. Fragmented Workflows and Communication Barriers - Are certain departments embracing change while others revert to old behaviors? If you ask the same process question to multiple departments how many different answers do you get? This inconsistency can lead to fragmented workflows, communication barriers, and missed opportunities for organizational efficiency and innovation.
   
   
2. Inconsistent Task Processes - Is your team using various task processes? Inconsistent processes can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and difficulties in collaboration between teams, hindering scalability and standardization efforts.
   
   
3. Underutilization of New Features - Do you feel overburdened when new features are introduced by software vendors? Poor adoption of new features is usually due to resource availability, an inadequate communication or change strategy, or end user change fatigue. These all limit the organization's ability to leverage the full potential of its technology investments. After all, these upgrades are included in your subscription and are often developed based on ecosystem feedback for needed functionality upgrades, so why not adopt them?
   
   
4. Workarounds Due to Procedural Changes - Are you using workarounds because of procedural changes? Maybe certain functions have built “shadow” systems or workarounds in Excel to manage their needs. Workarounds indicate inefficiencies or deficiencies in existing processes, leading to increased risk of errors, delays, and decreased employee satisfaction.
   
   
5. Disruptions from Leadership Change - Did new leadership request different approvals or routings for their workflows? Changes in leadership can disrupt established workflows and consistency across your business processes creating uncertainty among employees and hindering alignment with organizational goals.
   
   
6. Inadequate or Outdated Training - Was the training you received not comprehensive, or has it become outdated? Inadequate or outdated training can lead to suboptimal utilization of technology solutions. The employee user experience starts with communication and training, prior to utilizing the solution. Missteps here start a sequence of events minimizing adoption that is difficult to overcome.

The Solution: The Groove's User Adoption Assessment

 The Groove's User Adoption Assessment is designed to address these challenges head-on. By leveraging our 15+ years of experience deploying Workday, we can provide leading practices via a comprehensive analysis of your current Workday platform. We examine the system and the user experience with a focus on diagnosing the underlying reasons for low adoption and offering easily implementable recommendations. The Groove’s User Adoption Assessment is designed to help businesses maximize the effectiveness of their technology investments by ensuring enhanced adoption rates among users. These suggestions are never singularly focused and commonly range from minor configuration adjustments to complete process redesigns, both within and outside the application.

1. Comprehensive Staffing Plan - While a roadmap of easily consumable implementations is a start, we also understand that resourcing, both internally and externally will have a significant impact on project success. In this assessment, we look across your organization and prepare a staffing approach that considers availability, training & development needs, and ongoing business commitments. We layer this with our expertise to make sure the project has the right guidance at the right time with a laser focus on knowledge transfer and ownership.
   
   
2. Standardization of Workflows - The Groove’s User Adoption Assessment also takes a deeper dive into the processing of workflows, impacts of security, and the routings and approval processes to identify discrepancies and provide recommendations to standardize and streamline workflows across teams. Like when you deployed Workday, The Groove understands decisions of the past dictate what we have in front of us now, but we want to ensure we focus on the future and not recreate the wheel of times gone past.
   
   
3. Tailored Strategies for New Feature Adoption - The Groove’s User Adoption Assessment identifies barriers to adoption and offers tailored strategies and a project roadmap to promote the uptake of new features, ensuring that you're maximizing the potential of your software investments. Incorporating these new features into the previously mentioned roadmap and not treating them separately, focuses the communication and training to the end users. This enables trackable milestones for your leadership and minimizes change fatigue amongst your user population.
   
   
4. Effective Change Management - Providing insights and recommendations for effective change management and communication is pivotal to the success of any roll out. As users in different areas and different levels consume information differently, we help you navigate and craft a measurable Change Approach that allows smooth transitions across you user populations, maintains continuity in the technology adoption efforts, and can be validated post adoption phase.
   
   
5. Comprehensive Training Plans - Training plays a vital role to drive user adoption. Whether the training is for end users, super users, or service delivery team members, all aspects of the organization need to be aligned to gain the most effectiveness from the system. The Groove will craft a training plan leveraging training methods that have been identified to work within your organization to foster impactful organizational adoption of Workday, boosting user confidence and proficiency.

Conclusion

Businesses cannot afford to overlook the importance of user adoption when it comes to technology investments. The Groove's User Adoption Assessment is built based on customer demand and offers a roadmap to help businesses overcome challenges, optimize processes, and maximize the value of their technology investments. By prioritizing user adoption, organizations are putting their users first, forming a foundation that can unlock the full potential of their technology solutions and stay ahead in the digital age. Contact The Groove to discuss your needs.