User Adoption and Valuating Performance



© Synergy Corporate Technologies

In my position to push knowledge sharing and collaboration tools in a global organisation, I am dealing a lot with how can we motivate the people to adopt a new way of working together and the tools we are developing. Some things are very obvious like spreading a message from the leaders to give permission, building up the skills of the employees and introducing super users that can help on the spot.

One thing that I think is often neglected is the performance measurement of change initiatives or in other words, the (e)valuation of the new behaviours. And this is important in two ways.

First, we need to sell the initiative to our management, defining targets and showing that we have (hopefully) reached them. In this sense, we need to valuate the overall performance; how has the target audience adopted the new tool, how do they benefit from it. And this allows us as well to assign resources to the right place to further build success.

Secondly, we also need to motivate and engage the employees, show them that they have adopted the right behaviours and that these had an impact. Here we might want to give them individual targets and measure the individual performance. For Example, we could simply show them how their contribution has been viewed & appreciated by others and allow them to compare their own level of activity with peers (see my previous post how we have applied Tripadvisor’s user motivation model). This usually creates motivation and adoption among the users.

In many discussions I am asked what should we measure? And there is not an easy answer. What I think we should avoid is to measure what we can; but rather valuate the elements which we want to be changed. I would categorise this in three sections: