Easy ways you can engage your people's hearts and minds with new tech

If your organization has rolled out any new tech recently, I’m sure you’ll recognize that having technology available and using it are two different things. Most of us stick with what we know. So, while many organizations are spending time and money on new platforms, new agile processes or capabilities, it’s important to make sure people not only know how to use something, but also understand why they’re using it and the value it delivers.

Reaching out to engage the hearts and minds of more than 600,000 Accenture people is challenging. But along with the rest of our Journey & Change Management Center of Excellence (COE) team, I welcome the opportunity to draw on technology and people power to create value for our business and, ultimately, our work with clients.

How? Well, let me point you to a new case study that describes our mission to lead with a human-first approach to inspire Accenture employees to embrace change, adopt new behaviors and use technology to the full. And it reminds us of the risks of neglecting the people-side of change to fully apply technology for many digital transformation efforts.

Driving digital fluency

As I’ve mentioned in my previous blogs, we’ve defined four critical stages that continue to make a difference as we employ our change and adoption approach. First, we define a clear journey and change management strategy;. We adopt a modern approach to IT deployment; we focus on the vital role of adoption; and we maintain end-user support and enablement ongoing.

There’s little doubt that technology is helping us to realize our organization’s bold ambitions. But while tech is an enabler it is the people who are going to use it who are the north star that open the door to innovation and make new value a reality.

Here’s a quick summary of what leads to a successful change and adoption journey:

• Follow a crawl > walk > run approach to enable users to learn and adopt over time. Start early, including change management at the beginning of the project and make room for organic growth, where possible. Recognize the continued criticality of change and adoption post-tech deployment.
• Define key adoption metrics early on and know how you will collect them to track and measure success; think beyond log-ins as a means to understand user behavior.
• Establish top-level sponsorship as well as bottom-up change networks to drive change at every level.
• Engage early by knowing your user base and planning for personalized and targeted change initiatives; understand that one size doesn’t fit all.
• Partner with the business to understand the intended business value. Discover how the technology aligns with the business strategy and drive outcomes.

I encourage you to take a look at our story titled: “Modern change management” and find out more about how we migrated our entire organization to Microsoft Teams—our change and adoption strategy was instrumental in making Teams a core platform where people spend their time. It’s these kinds of outcomes which bring us greater digital fluency that everyone can enjoy.