Online Collaboration Tools – How to Get Your Team Members to Adopt Them

Relatively new tools used for better productivity in a business are online collaboration tools. These tools have indeed proven to be very helpful, regardless of the nature of your business. This is also one of the reasons why organizations all over the world are adopting to these new methodologies. However, there are cases wherein team members or employees are unfavorable to the use of these tools, and this can be of great surprise to IT managers, especially when they offer the best and extremely feature-rich tools to users.

In this regard, what project managers or team leaders need to understand is that it is going to be a challenge to break the conventional habit of corporate emailing. It is only natural for those heading projects to be on the lookout of new and better tools that promise better workflow efficiency, simple and quick data sharing and instant communication; however, they must also remember that easy user adaptability is a very important aspect in software’s deployment, as well as in its success.

Understand Your Employees

While an organization takes special care to employ skilled IT people, who undoubtedly provide effective valuation of various technologies, very often the idea of how the other non-IT employees are going to use the technology is not much dealt with. True, it may be a very tedious task to teach new tricks to an old dog, but any organization that really desires to put the most recent technology to its benefits must find an effective solution to change the way individual employees handle their workload, or the complete deployment may be a disaster. You may have purchased the best online collaboration tools for use in your organization, but it will hardly offer you any benefits if your employees do not find it easy to adapt to.

Employee Input

A very possible reason for the dissatisfaction of your employees in respect to the online collaboration software you may have chosen is that it is being imposed. There is a simple solution for it – you can ask them to volunteer for the software evaluation team, and review all the considerable alternatives. Assign the core team to ask for user opinions and feedback, and this will give an overall idea of what your people really want. If you would like a little more interaction, you could always ask them to come up with possible options before finalizing on which online collaboration tools to choose.

How to Choose the Best Online Collaboration Tools for Your Business

In an organization that aims to enhance employee adaptation, the initiative can be taken by letting them take part in the selection phase. Project managers must realize that all these tools are created differently, and only because one of them comprises of additional features that are extremely productive does not make it the optimum choice. Many tools all combined in one package may give a hard time to your employees when learning it, eventually causing resistance. Instead, opt for software that offers ease-of-use, while also being functional and productive.