Risk
What to Do When Your Team Doesn’t Want to Use New Technology
You’ve finally got the budget for new technology. You’ve invested in a solution that will solve many of your organization’s security problems. Unfortunately, your employees are less than thrilled about using that solution. What do you do?
Change can be hard — how do you manage it?
Human beings don’t always respond well to change. Research from McKinsey finds that 70% of change programs fail because of employee pushback and lack of support from management. Some of this occurs because employees find it difficult to leave their comfort zone. According to Gartner, 73% of employees experience stress during times of change at work.
Naturally, you don’t want to stress out your team, however, it’s important they use the new technology. Managing change is critical, especially in times of digital transformation. It’s especially important in the physical security industry, which can be change-resistant.
There are steps you can take, however, to help your team adjust to new technology:
1. Explain what’s in it for them
We once had a client that had been using security experts to manually assess risk at their many sites. It took the experts weeks to write up their reports and build spreadsheets after an assessment, and they didn’t enjoy it. When the company moved to Circadian Risk’s product, and were able to do assessments using a tablet, there was some pushback: it took time to get used to the new platform.
However the leadership at the organization explained the benefit of taking time to adjust to the new technology: it might take time to learn the platform, but the experts would no longer have to write up a report. Circadian Risk would do that part automatically.
Find and explain the ways that the platform will benefit the users. Paint a picture of what your organization will look like once the technology is adopted. This will help your team better understand why the technology is being adopted and make buy-in easier for them.
2. Be clear in your communication
The same client faced resistance from site managers when Circadian Risk was adopted. Now, for the first time, their sites would be ranked and compared against one another. The leadership team had to be clear in their communications: this change was not a punitive one. It would simply show the organization the risk at every site and help them allocate resources for the ones that needed the most help.
You can’t over-communicate during times of change. People will naturally worry about adoption of new technology. Make sure you’re listening to their concerns and responding to them.
3. Recognize that there will always be pushback
No matter what you do, there will likely be some resistance from at least a few team members. People don’t like change, but if you’re prepared to meet that resistance and work with them, you can get buy-in.
Create a proactive security culture
The best way to manage change in an organization is to establish a proactive culture of change management. Make change the constant in your organization, because the world is constantly changing and your organization should be as well. Change is a good thing; the more an organization is open to change, the more agile and resilient it will be, and the better your team will be at responding to changing risks.
Creating this sort of culture takes time and energy, but the payoff is worth it.
For further reading on building a proactive security culture at your company, check out the ‘Culture of Risk’ white paper by the CSO Risk Council.
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