How to Get Real Results from Employee Digital Adoption

What is employee digital adoption and why is it more relevant than ever?

In this article, we’ll explore:

• What employee digital adoption means
• The drawbacks of not creating a digital adoption function
• The benefits and ROI of employee digital adoption

To start with, let’s define our terms.

Key Digital Adoption Definitions

Here are a few key concepts that can help set the context for digital adoption and employee digital adoption:

• Digital Transformation – Organizations that “digitize” their business, by adopting new technologies, business models, and strategies that enable them to survive and thrive in the digital marketplace.
• Digital Adoption – Adoption of new technology, making use of that technology to its fullest extent, improving software users’ performance through digital training, and so forth.
• Employee Digital Adoption – Digital adoption that focuses on the adoption of software within an enterprise. The aim is improving employee performance, productivity, and time-to-competency.

Below, we’ll cover this last point in detail … why it matters and a few success strategies.

Why Employee Digital Adoption?

Why even create an employee digital adoption strategy?

After all, with a little bit of training, employees should be able to learn new software.

Unfortunately, that ideal doesn’t match with reality.

Without training, workers won’t know how to use tools.

In today’s ever-changing business world, software adoption professionals must handle:

• Employees’ busy schedules
• Complex technology stacks with complex workflows
• Workers’ reluctance to learn new tools

Put all these together and you get a mixture of employee resistance, information overload, and frustration.

The results of poor software training aren’t pretty:

• Poor performance
• Low productivity
• Slow rates of learning
• Lack of motivation
• Fatigue and burnout

Employee digital adoption programs are designed to prevent such costly errors.

Not only that, an employee digital adoption program will deliver significant returns for your business.

Let’s look at some reasons to implement an employee digital adoption strategy:

Boost Productivity and Performance

Employee productivity depends on their skill levels.

Quite simply, if a worker doesn’t know how to use a software, he or she will likely perform at sub-par levels.

The quality of the training, therefore, directly impacts workers’ productivity levels.

For most businesses, productivity and performance are easy to understand – they directly impact the bottom line.

From an investment-oriented perspective, therefore, it is easy to make a business case for employee digital adoption initiatives.

Tackle the Digital Skills Crisis

Study after study predicts that digital technology will forever change the way we work.

Technologies such as automation are predicted to dramatically shift the labor landscape:

• Reskilling will become the norm in many businesses and industries
• We are just seeing the tip of the disruption iceberg – in the coming years, technologies such as automation, AI, and robotics will help create an “augmented workforce”
• Many experts predict that lifelong learning and continuous education will become business-as-usual

An employee digital adoption process – one that is permanent – can help a workforce stay relevant and modern.

And, as a result, the business itself will be able to adapt to the changing times.

Increase Employee Engagement, Longevity, and Loyalty

Employees with the right skill set won’t just perform better, they’ll be happier.

Increased engagement with their work will:

• Improve morale and motivation
• Enhance their perception of the company and management
• Boost the reputation of the company as a workplace
• Increase employee retention and loyalty

A more satisfied workforce will be able to contribute more to its own organization.

And by improving the work life of its employees, the organization will be making a positive impact on their lives.

Strategies, Tips, and Tactics

Here are a few tips for extracting the most value out of digital adoption efforts:

• Make employee digital adoption a permanent business function. The digital revolution will not stop with the next platform, tool, or technology. Digital transformation will continue into the foreseeable future, so digital adoption should also remain permanent.
• Take advantage of modern digital training tools. Online education platforms, such as learning management systems, are good tools for enterprise education. 
• Focus on the employee experience. Employees have a lot in common with customers. Like customers, their perception of the organization determines how much they support an organization. Good employee experiences produce positive perceptions, feelings, and results.
• Support employees’ career development. Digital transformation has made career development a top concern for workers. Today’s employees know that the future of work is uncertain. So they are likely to be loyal to companies that support their career growth.
• Use digital adoption platforms. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are specifically designed for digital adoption. They are fully customizable, offering in-app training, usage analytics, shortened learning curves, decreased training costs, and more.

This is just a handful of tips for getting started with employee digital adoption.

For more in-depth coverage of digital adoption, check out more articles on our digital adoption blog.