It can always feel intimidating to introduce new technology to your staff. If you are seriously overhauling your current systems, you need to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to correctly onboard the new equipment so your staff can start using it with confidence. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do to ensure that this process is as quick and as painless as possible.
Trust Your Staff’s Intuition
No-one likes to be spoken down to. When introducing new tech to your staff, you need to make sure that you are trusting their intuition and intelligence. Being patronising when trying to introduce something new is only going to stir up some resentments.
Chances are, they will be able to use their instincts to work out how to best use the new tech. Let’s take the example of a smart card system. Most of your staff will probably have seen such a system used in television and film, therefore familiarising themselves with the smart card reader and the cards themselves is likely to be a fairly easy process.
Allow a Training Day
If necessary, it might be a good idea to put on some form of training day for staff. If you are conducting a complete overhaul of systems – or introducing a new product that is likely to make quite an impact – you should definitely consider implementing some form of training session to best support staff.
This should ideally be held by the suppliers of the technology. You might find that they offer training for free as part of a support package with the software or service. Check with them to find out what the best training schedule might be.
Ask for Feedback
It is important to collect feedback from your staff to ensure that the solution that you have found is the best for your company’s needs. It might help to fix certain issues that your employees need to be addressed. What’s more, though it might have the best reviews online or be the best value for money, these do not guarantee that it will be the right fit for the company.
Therefore, it is important that you find out how your employees feel about the new technology. Does it work in the way that has been promised? Is it easy for them to use? If not, it might be better to search out something else.
Introducing new tech is a hurdle that many companies will have to face multiple times. Regardless of what industry your business might be located in, you need to ensure that you are going to be able to deliver the best possible results to clients, and the right tech will often form a key part of this. You need to make sure that all staff will be comfortable using it, and that it delivers the results you expected from your initial investment in the product.