Helping Employees in Adapting to New Software

Onboarding new employees efficiently is arguably one of the most crucial stages of looking after any business’ key assets – the workforce. 

Every HR professional knows that in order to keep their personnel happy and successful in their jobs, one of the most important things to get right from day one is ensuring that new hires can use all the company’s various software packages for their job roles. 

Learning new software is like taking on any other unfamiliar skill – some people, who may be technologically astute, can pick these things up within minutes. Others might take months. There’s nothing worse than an employee suffering in silence and remaining badly inefficient because they don’t want to embarrass themselves by asking colleagues for help at their computer terminal. 

Asking your co-worker more than once what buttons to click to achieve whatever task makes people look incompetent. As a result, an employee might be tempted to ‘wing it’ and click around, probably causing more harm than good, making expensive mistakes, and, in the final analysis, affecting bottom-line profit. Some workers might even be tempted not to use new software or updated software at all, and make excuses for their tardiness. 

Clearly, an efficient way of helping people to adapt to new software, or software changes, is required. This is where Digital Adoption Software comes into its own. 

AI to the rescue

The concept of Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) is simple enough in itself, but extremely difficult to achieve in practical terms without it being driven by highly advanced artificial intelligence. In effect, a ‘teaching software layer’ sits above the software in use by the employee and shows the user the likely next steps. This results in fewer erroneous or empty clicks and mistakes by human operators. 

Crucially, the AI learns about the individual user’s ‘learning style’, so it can predict what the person is likely to do wrong from previous interactions and prevent them before they occur. It’s almost like having a friendly, knowledgeable colleague over your shoulder, advising you what buttons to click-on and why. 

Having a DAP for your people is becoming an essential part of any company’s digitization strategy. Indeed, 93% of C-Suite executives, when surveyed, emphasized that they recognized the need for digital readiness amongst their employees. The article highlights some problematic issues in getting an entire organization on the same page in terms of everyone using the same software packages, especially in geographically scattered workforces. Apparently almost 90% of execs surveyed said that excessive silo-rigidity of datasets prevented effective knowledge sharing in the workplace. But once that data is available, you need to be adept at accessing software to understand it. That’s where a DAP excels. 

A dashboard for managers

DAPs can integrate Digital Experience Analytics (DXA), which provide analysis of users’ experiences within  applications to highlight where they struggle and educate them with tips and steers before this happens. End-users can also recreate ‘flow streams’ of past sessions to see where they went wrong while using software, enabling them to quickly correct their behaviors for the next time they work. DAPs can also offer a dashboard for company managers so that they can conduct a knowledge gap analysis of their personnel’s general IT competence and confidence levels. 

In conjunction with using DAPs, it’s just as important not to make the mistake that many decision makers did during the Covid-19 pandemic, when remote working became commonplace. All of a sudden, everyone had to communicate effectively even though they were remote working. People were using their own devices – security potential breaches suddenly became a nightmare, and logging onto company servers tested systems to the limit. So Chief Technical Officers (CTOs) and HR people often threw money at a dozen software packages at once and this, many times, caused more problems than it solved. This article highlights the perils of not getting your digital transformation strategy right, especially when new software and processes are required. 

Returning to the educational aspect of any organization’s transformation to digital strategies, DAPs win over every time because their AI can teach different employees in bespoke ways. For example, it can often be a generational issue when learning computer software. Younger people tend to be more ‘Gung Ho’ and will click anything to see if it works, the Boomer generation often dare not click ahead for fear of breaking something! It’s all down to ‘digital literacy’ as this article neatly summarizes. 

No-one forgets a bad teacher

But let’s look at some of the downsides of all this technology for a moment. Think of it again in educational terms, we all remember the really good teachers and equally the bad ones at our schools. A bad educational software package is considerably worse than useless, it can alienate poor learners and confuse people, but AI is turning that situation around; indeed the WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform has excellent software reviews on the prestigious Gartner website. 

Clearly, DAPs must be doing something right for its customers as Wikipedia and Crunchbase both state that one DAP platform provider, since its inception in 2012, has raised a total of $307.5M in funding over ten rounds, with over 2000 corporate customers since 2016.

 It’s clear – DAPs are the future of software training and encouraging employees to accept change. It’s easy to see that it won’t be long before any I.T. application at work or at home doesn’t come with a DAP built in.

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