Adopting Collaboration

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What’s the number one complaint about new collaboration technology? No one uses it! The business case has been written and approved. The infrastructure has been deployed and made available. A training class or two has been completed. But the people who are supposed to make use of the new technology don’t. Instead, they ignore it, continuing their previous ways of working. What a waste of money and effort on the behalf of the IT department! What a waste of an opportunity on the behalf of the users!

As part of a multi-year project to better understand how to overcome the user adoption challenge for collaboration technology, I recently ran a global survey on user adoption strategies. The intent of the survey was not only to discover which strategies people were using for user adoption, but also which ones they found most effective. The results are in, and they’re startling! There were over 400 respondents to the survey, and each had a lead role to play in setting the user adoption strategy for their organization. The most commonly used user adoption strategies are among the least effective for bringing about change, and the least commonly used strategies are among the most effective for bringing about change. It’s time for a revolution in our approach to user adoption. In this article, I look at the responses from organizations using Central Desktop and SharePoint, but while this article looks at two specific tools, the findings are generalizable.

The Central Desktop Respondents

Central Desktop is an online team collaboration and Intranet solution. People from over 200 organizations using Central Desktop responded to the survey—but note that just under 85 percent of respondents came from organizations with less than 100 employees. The most commonly used strategies were Web-based training, pages on the Intranet, and over-the-shoulder watching. See Figure One for a chart that ranks the use of many different user adoption strategies.

Now compare these results with the strategies that are actually effective in user adoption (See Figure Two) Web-based training is one of the top most effective strategies, but notice the others that rank highly that aren’t commonly used. For example, “Real-to-Life Scenarios” was ranked eighth (8) in being used as a strategy, but is the fourth most effective strategy (48 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). Likewise for the “Zero Other Options” strategy: it is one of the least used strategies, but it ranked third in effectiveness—49 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”.

Later in the survey, the focus shifted to probing respondents about strategies that worked well for them, and what they would do differently if they were to start again. The results here picked up on the earlier questions, but respondents mixed in a healthy dose of their own advice too. In ranked order, what worked well in user adoption were the zero other options strategy (Central Desktop is the place to work, and we have closed the alternatives), making it real (to talk about and demonstrate the use of Central Desktop for the real work of people and teams, rather than focusing on generic capabilities), and using people of influence to drive interest and adoption (if senior executives were actually using Central Desktop, rather than just talking about it, it was very powerful, and sent the signal that executives could learn to use it, and they had, so it must be important), among others. When asked what they would do differently, themes ran the gamut from making it real (as above), gaining a better understanding of the service upfront (so the lead internal champion of Central Desktop could make effective recommendations about how to use it), and better initial training for end-users, among others.

If you want to learn more, there’s a complete report on how Central Desktop organizations approach user adoption: “User Adoption Strategies: The Central Desktop Approach.”

The SharePoint Respondents

I mentioned that generally smaller-sized organizations were using Central Desktop. Before you discount the above analysis, consider this: there were almost 200 respondents from organizations using Microsoft SharePoint as their collaboration tool, and the size of organization involved was much larger on average. Almost 30 percent were less than 100, 15 percent were between 101 and 500, 10 percent were between 501 and 1,000, and another 20 percent were between 1,001 and 5,000 employees. The interesting thing is that the results for the SharePoint analysis were not all that different.

“Pages on the Intranet” was the most commonly used strategy, but was the least effective! The most effective strategy was “Over-the-Shoulder” watching (65 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). However, it was only the fifth most used strategy. Some strategies, while not so commonly used, are effective when they are used. For example, “Real-to-Life Scenarios” was ranked ninth (9) in being used as a strategy, but is the second most effective strategy (50 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”). Likewise for the “Zero Other Options” strategy: it is one of the least used strategies (ranking 12th of 13), but it ranked sixth in effectiveness—36.8 percent of respondents using the strategy said it was either “Very Helpful” or “Extremely Helpful”. And extremely interestingly, the most frequently mentioned strategy in the free text answers about strategy effectiveness was one-to-one coaching, and this for organizations running SharePoint!

As with the Central Desktop findings, a complete report on how SharePoint organizations are approaching user adoption is available. It’s part of my work around governance for SharePoint: “SharePoint Roadmap Governance Themes: User Adoption Strategies” in the reference section.

Encourage User Adoption

Organizations spend a ton of money on the technology and infrastructure to support collaboration between people, but too often don’t put any intentioned effort or thought into how to encourage user adoption. This article has outlined the most effective strategies for user adoption of collaboration technology, based on a recent survey. Now that you know what’s effective, go and do the effective things!