How Not to Introduce New Tech: Big mistakes bosses make

"Managers are turning to new technology to improve decision making and innovation. But they often screw up a crucial part of the process: getting employees on board with the changes.

The problem, at its most basic, is that managers usually don't anticipate that systems will lead to fears among employees who feel disrespected or displaced. And they usually don't recognize that the systems often mean employees have to take on new work that disrupts routines.

Understanding these pitfalls is crucial. Our research has found that helping employees to accept new technologies is just as important as making sure the systems work in the first place.

Do it right, and you have employees who embrace the new technologies. Do it wrong, and you have employees who are frustrated, resentful, angry -- and likely to resist implementation.

Here are two of the most common ways that managers trip themselves up -- and how they can avoid those mistakes.

Using junior employees as trainers

On the surface, it seems to make perfect sense: Younger employees who grew up immersed in the digital world will surely be quick to learn new technology. And they'll be a lot more flexible about incorporating it into their routines. So, why not use them to train the rest of the staff?

Because this strategy can make longtime employees feel slighted -- and make it tougher to train them.

For example, my co-authors and I studied the introduction of new electronic-medical-record technology across multiple medical clinics. At most of the sites, leaders chose young trainers. But the leaders didn't realize that this move challenged the status of employees with long tenure and expertise in the old way of doing things. These employees questioned the ability of the trainers, complained about training procedures and disputed whether the new technology-related tasks were worthwhile.

What did work? Rotating the role of trainer -- so that sometimes longer-tenured employees did the teaching. In those cases, trainees embraced rather than resisted the new technology.

Choosing trainers who are initially less skilled might not seem to be the most efficient way to do things. But putting rookies in charge is a likely recipe for failure.

Adding a new layer of workers to handle technology

Sometimes leaders decide to sidestep the problems of training. Instead of getting everybody up to speed, they add new employees to take on the burden of dealing with tech -- such as data scientists -- or designate certain employees as "superusers" to take on those new jobs. This may spare current employees from having to learn new technical skills. But it is likely to raise new problems.

For example, a team of researchers studied a telecommunications company that added data scientists to crunch data from multiple sources and automate the process of identifying sales leads. That sparked a battle with salespeople, who felt that the new methods undermined their longstanding strategy of building personal relationships with customers, and using their gut to identify new opportunities.

None of this means that adding new roles is doomed to fail. But managers should be careful not to get caught up in the idea of AI as a magic bullet that can displace the old way of doing things. In addition, they shouldn't signal that they value data scientists or other people in new roles more than traditional employees.

 

And, crucially, they should be sure to hire new people who have the emotional skills to reassure current workers and explain the new systems." [1]

 

1. Workplace Technology (A Special Report) --- How Not to Introduce New Tech: Big mistakes bosses make
Kellogg, Katherine C.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 29 Nov 2021: R.2.