UK: Top 5 Tips For Successful Workday User Adoption

Are you an HR or Finance leader looking to get the most out of your Workday investment? We're here to help. In this blog, we'll look at 5 easy ways in which you can improve user adoption within your organisation.

So, what is user adoption?

The main focus of user adoption is all about the people, making sure your employees are using software or technology in the way it was intended, increasing user engagement and improving user experience.

Why is user adoption so important?

Many organisations tend to underestimate the challenges they face when adopting new technologies, and critically, lack of user adoption is often the main reason a project can fail. Not everyone will be early adopters when it comes to change.

It's natural to have reservations about introducing a system or new addition to your technology stack that could fundamentally change the way your organisation operates. Therefore, it is crucial to invest in change management.

Let's use a small, personal example, have you ever gone to a new hairdresser or barber and felt nervous and anxious about the outcome? I know I have. Not investing in the concept of change is like spending a large sum of money to get your hair coloured and then not maintaining it afterwards by using cheap shampoo that will strip the colour, making the initial investment pointless.

It's as simple as that, why invest in technology if you're not going to invest in making sure it's used effectively and maintained to meet the needs of your people and business?

How do customers get started with change?

Organisations need to understand the importance of change and user adoption. For a lot of companies this is an emerging fluffy term that is the last of their worries during a large project. But over the years, we have seen time and time again where projects can fail because their people weren't brought along on the journey and therefore resisted change.

So, it is vital to understand the importance of adoption and invest in it—and not just as an add on to your project, but instead it should be embedded from the beginning so that design decisions can be made with people in mind.

Make sure you have the skills and resources for this to build and deliver an effective change strategy. It should be a workstream of its own, and if you don't have the necessary skills in house, make it part of your requirements when going out to tender for a deployment partner. 

Here are the most important considerations for achieving user adoption.

1. Set a clear vision for the transformation

• When creating your business case for the project make sure you understand the need for the new technology or software and what you're trying to achieve
• Your organisation strategy and HR/Finance strategy should filter down to the vision of the project and ultimately your change strategy
• When communicating to the business make sure this vision is clear and relatable, use it when setting the scene during communications or engagement activities.

2. Know your stakeholders

• Our customers often make the mistake of thinking the only groups affected by a deployment are their HR or Finance teams. Even if you're just starting your Workday journey and implementing core HCM, this will impact HR, Managers, employees, Executive board and so on.
• By identifying stakeholder groups, you can start to map the impact at all levels so that the appropriate change mitigations can be incorporated into your plan, different groups require different levels of communications and training for example. If you miss a group in your planning this can have a downstream impact on user adoption. In some cases, particularly with organisations with operations in Germany, work councils will be an important stakeholder group to engage as they have the power to stop a project in its tracks.
• It is also important to identify individuals in the organisation who can help the transition, these will be your key stakeholders and are usually influential or respected people in the organisation.
• Know who your resistors are and perhaps include them in decisions and showcase the technology early on so that they feel involved.
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3. Keep your people informed

• Plan your communication activities via a change plan, so you can identify when and who you are communicating to. It's key to work back on this in terms of what approvals are needed beforehand and make sure you use the appropriate channels.
• Make it meaningful – this is where the impact assessment is such a powerful tool, you need to resonate with different groups of people, what is changing for them and what are the benefits to them specifically as a group. You can't take a one size fits all approach when communicating internally.
• Empower your leadership team—these people should form part of your key stakeholders, get them involved in the communications so that people in the organisation understand how the project fits into the strategic direction of the company. Before your leadership are involved in communications, they need to feel empowered to deliver messages down to the company, so engage with them early in the process.
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4. Engage the detractors

• Make them your advocates, make them feel listened to and get them involved in certain aspects of the project. You might want to have your detractors form part of your change network. (For those who aren't familiar with a change network, it is a group of people who will support the promotion and communication of the future change, as well as representing the needs and concerns of the organisation therefore supporting the end user adoption).
• Consider bringing your detractors into the testing stage. If they get early sight of the technology, they can feel valued and listened to.
• You can then use your change network and testers to help deliver training to the organisation.
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5. Make it fun and measure engagement

Originally Published 20 December 2022

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.