This week during a webinar with NTEN, I had the honor of learning from Dahna Goldstein and Victoria M. Grady, PhD during their webinar titled, “Technology Meets Psychology in Your Organization”. In the consulting field, we talk about this as change management – like a new snowfall, it continues to be problematic – despite all the strides we have made in technology, which never ceases to amaze me. So – I suppose what I continue to be reminded of is that it’s human nature that people are human – we all have different speeds in which we can accept change. We are resistant, fearful and cautious with anything new, especially if we have unrealistic expectations.
Nowadays, not only does the IT person need to be asking everyday customers how their experience has been with the technology, but what could make the process easier to adopt as we start to embrace more social media. Through an open communication approach, anything we as an organization ask our customers to change in terms of behavior may be not always perceived as a ‘gain in time or energy’ – so we need to talk with our customers and think through areas that are lost in terms of their time to re-learn process, log in, navigation or process. We always need to keep in mind as IT advocates our customers’ perspectives as they are the ones that are out there advocating for the cause and/or committed to making change in the world.
Important Change Management Approach:
Rather than going directly to making a change relating to technology without our customers input – make sure that we include them in the process along the way. Ask them for their input in a focus group, invite them into a design or testing process, invite them to review any critical user documents or communications. Work with key active members to give you the feedback that you need to your communication of technology changes effective and useful to the end users.
Consider spending more time to get to know your customers through their patterns of behavior, through their preferred interaction methods and customize, customize, customize. Because while we live in a technology rich environment today – we need to be conscious of the rate of change that our targeted audience can accept and make sure to involve them along the way.
