Perhaps you are past having noticed the need to upgrade how people are communicating in your organization, and have already made an informed choice about an employee engagement platform. It’s time to introduce the new tool to everyone and work towards platform adoption!
Despite companies’ investments in technologies designed to make teams more agile, many aren’t fully unlocking the potential ROI of their HR and internal communication platforms. In fact, only 9% of employees say they use most of the capabilities of their existing HR tools.
According to the results of a survey of 1000+ HR professionals by DocuSign the main reasons why businesses are not leveraging HR software include: these not integrating with other tools, insufficient training around the platform, and its intuitiveness.
Source: HR Trends Report, Docusign.
How do you ensure readiness to leverage your employee engagement tool’s full potential? Use these 5 tips for a successful platform adoption strategy:
1. Keep an eye on platform Activation
What is Activation?
Activation is a metric representing those actively engaging on your employee app for instance, as a percentage of total purchased seats. Precisely, it looks at how many employees visited your platform or opened a communication you sent them, during a specific period of time.
Actimo measures this on a monthly basis.
The power of activation
Platform activation is essential to
- Increase employee engagement for the long-run
- Maximize the value you’re getting from your HR, internal communication, or 360° employee engagement software, as a tool to drive remote culture
- Gain insights into what employees find engaging, and possible information gaps
A standard way to calculate Activation is:
Activation = MAU / Total purchased seats
where MAU is Monthly Active Users
Keep track of activation, and consider asking your employee engagement software vendor about average Activation numbers. Benchmarking by industry, or organization size in terms of employees may certainly be valuable.
As a good rule of thumb, make sure Activation is never lower than 70%!
Furthermore, low activation may be due to a number of factors. Yet, a great Customer Success team at your HR Tech vendor organization should be able to investigate and help you improve the adoption and activation of your employee engagement platform.
2. Set up project governance – No PM, no Success!
Gartner estimates that 55% to 75% of all projects fail to meet their intended objectives. Don’t let it happen to your innovative project around an employee engagement solution! Set up clear project governance from the start, and ask your Customer Success team for advice.
When it comes to introducing the new software, in many cases the roles of Project Owner and Project Manager are combined in one person.
If it’s you – keep organized! Make sure that a vision of the final product and communicating it to stakeholders, is in line and allows for completion of planning, organizing, and managing all phases of a project.
For inspiration and best practices: ask your Customer Success team to share what project team setups have worked best for their customers and why.
3. Reap the benefits of influencers within your company
Many approach change management only from the top-down.
When it comes to introducing the new employee software this way rarely works. You intend to change the communication behavior of most of your organization! Keep in mind, old habits die hard.
Instead, include and involve influential employees within your organization to increase people’s interest in the platform. These people should have a lot of strong connections within your organization and a natural curiosity for the technology. Moreover, find and ask a couple of team members to become in-house experts on the tool, actively engage on it, and tell others about it.
Treat them like influencers. Treat them like stars. These early adopters not only will help you to achieve the buy-in from more employees, but also make the transition to the new platform go more smoothly.
4. Embrace continuous, and flexible training
No matter how big or small your Internal Comms or HR team is – each team member has a different level of comfort with the new technology. The same thing applies to the entire workforce using the employee engagement software. Plan training activities based on different needs – no size fits all!
Some will prefer in-depth training. Others may prefer to watch a couple of tutorials or just explore the employee training themselves.
Whatever way you go – make sure to revisit training regularly, or at least ensure your vendor has training resources available on-demand. According to Gartner, each hour of effective training is worth 5 hours to the employing organization. This comes down to well-trained end-users getting to where they need to be in a quarter of the time, spending less time correcting errors, and needing less support from co-workers or helpdesks.
It’s important to ask for feedback from your end-users during training to adjust to the change if needed.
5. Plan your internal communications
Well planned is well executed!
No matter how great the employee platform is, you will never reach high levels of platform adoption or consistently have low levels of activation without the proper editorial structure.
Make sure to create and use an internal communication content calendar! Download our free template if you don’t have a great one yet.
Essentially, an internal communication content calendar is:
- A toolkit for you to improve the quality and consistency of your communication
- A way of ensuring that your content is accessible in the right channels
- A tool for evaluation – learn from the insights on how the content performs
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All in all, make project governance, change management, and leadership, and end-user training the central focus to see success in the adoption of your employee engagement tool.
A properly integrated software with high rates of adoption has the potential to truly make a difference. For instance, it could help Internal Communications and HR teams, and truly all employees, to become more adaptable in the face of a changing working environment.
Interested in sharing your perspective on the ROI of employee engagement and tools that drive it? Participate in a 10-minute survey, exclusive to Executives and senior leaders.
Learn more about Actimo and how our Customer Success team can help you attain high platform adoption and activation.
