By Chanel chambers, Vice president of product marketing, Lakeside Software
Have you ever watched a tennis game? Each player adapts his or her game to the opponent’s strengths and weakness. I learned as an amateur tennis player that there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits all” approach. It’s the same when it comes to workplace technology; a standard approach will leave you completely disappointed.
A split-second technology outage at a crucial moment can be the difference between winning and losing for your team, just as a missed shot on a breakpoint can change the momentum of a match. In the rush to maximize uptime, companies often forget about the most important component: the users of the technology.
Businesses that are successful aren’t just those who have a robust infrastructure or high availability. They are also those who humanise the technology by understanding their users’ needs and creating systems specifically for them. Similar to how a tennis player adapts his strategy to match the strengths of their opponent, companies need to tailor their tech solutions according to each member’s unique needs. This article explores strategies that businesses can use to move their technology model towards a people-centric approach.
Know Your Players
A professional tennis player will observe and analyze the game of their opponent before stepping on to the court. This is done in order to determine their perceived strengths and weaknesses. Businesses should follow suit. Organisations must have a thorough understanding of their users. It is important to go beyond the surface level demographics in order to gain meaningful insights into their habits, needs and challenges.
Businesses can learn how to use technology and where it fails by examining the daily challenges faced by their employees and understanding their needs. Understanding this allows companies to make better decisions regarding technology investments.
If your graphic design team in India is working with a London-based IT department that regularly releases software updates at 7pm GMT, then you may be wasting valuable design time due to time zone differences. What if all the traders of your multinational bank log into their devices at the trading floor on time, 8 AM GMT? To avoid losing trades, you need to make sure their devices are working optimally.
By engaging your employees to identify common tech-related issues, you can uncover problems like slow loading speeds or difficulty with complex user interfaces. Businesses can improve team satisfaction and productivity by addressing these issues.
Repeated tech disruptions can also have a negative impact on employee satisfaction and stress, resulting in a decrease in job satisfaction. These issues may have wider implications such as decreased productivity, reduced workforce loyalty, and increased turnover rates. Businesses should therefore prioritize effective and responsive technologies.
Customising Your Style
The first step is to gather user insights. After you’ve gathered insights into your employees’ needs it’s now time to apply these findings throughout your organization. As a tennis player adjusts his or her game to face different opponents, companies should create detailed personas of employees to identify specific technology requirements, ranging from tailored software tools to tailored programmes.
It’s important to ensure the best results. Think of it as perfecting your tennis serve. You can improve workplace efficiency and employee satisfaction by tailoring technology to the specific needs of each group. For example, you could provide tablets to sales teams to allow them to be mobile during meetings or high-performance computers to engineers.
It is interesting to note that the cause of low productivity and high turnover can often be traced back to suboptimal IT and digital experiences. By adopting an IT strategy that is proactive and uses non-intrusive technologies, such as Digital Employee Experience (DEX), these challenges can be transformed into opportunities. By providing employees with self-service tools and learning resources as well as professional development opportunities, a robust DEX strategy will empower them and make them feel valued and engaged.
Organisations can improve their day-today operations by ensuring technology is used to benefit the people who are behind the screens. They will also have a more satisfied and committed workforce.
Understanding your opponent
Businesses must constantly measure the success of their tech solutions. Just as a tennis player will evaluate every shot to adjust their strategy, they too should be measuring their technology. The traditional metrics of uptime and performance are important but don’t tell the entire story.
Understanding user satisfaction is essential to gaining a complete picture. Companies should therefore focus on metrics such as user adoption rates and productivity gains. By collecting and analysing feedback from users, the necessary adjustments can be made to ensure that technology continues meeting user needs and driving results.
However, this doesn’t need to look like traditional Service Level Agreements (SLA). Many organisations are now moving towards experience level agreements. Unlike traditional SLAs, which focus on technical metrics like uptime and response time, XLAs centre around the actual user experience. This user-centric strategy aligns IT with business goals and ensures that IT initiatives directly contribute to the success of businesses.
Create a fantastic support team
Tech support’s role is changing as technology advances. It has moved from a reactive to a predictive and proactive stance. This is similar to the way a tennis pro anticipates the moves of an opponent to keep the upper hand. IT support services must be able to anticipate and resolve problems before they affect productivity.
By utilizing AI and data analytics in order to monitor systems and detect anomalies in real-time, businesses are able to quickly address these issues. This is similar to a tennis match where a player adjusts their strategy to meet new challenges.
This proactive approach improves DEX, by creating a more stable digital environment. It is important to prioritise the user experience, and engage in regular feedback sessions. This feedback loop is a continuous process that identifies improvement areas and aligns technology investments with user needs.
Improve your game
A well-rounded technology strategy goes beyond evaluating the technology, creating personas and understanding user needs. Businesses are under pressure to improve the digital ecosystem as digital interactions grow. This is not limited to employee-focused solutions. This involves adopting self-healing technologies and robust monitoring tools to proactively manage and optimise every touchpoint, ensuring rapid issue resolution–especially critical when IT staff are dispersed and may not be immediately available.
To achieve sustained success, organisations must develop technology that is able to adapt to their users. This will improve performance and competitiveness. This approach puts people first, not only addressing current IT and dissatisfaction issues, but also attracting top talent and retaining valuable employees.
Businesses must constantly optimise their technology to meet their evolving team’s needs, just as tennis players strive to improve their game. The full potential of a team can be unlocked by prioritising the user experience, investing effectively in technology and cultivating a culture that encourages continuous improvement.
Organisations that put people at the center of their technological initiatives achieve more than just uptime. They also create lasting success.
Billy Jean King said it best, “Champions play until they get the right answer.” This reflects the pursuit of excellence both in sports and business.
The original version of this article, Empowering your team through personalized tech solutions will serve up success, appeared first on HR news.
