by Michael Sampson, author and consultant
This is the final of a series of posts about my new book, User Adoption Strategies. In this final post, I turn our attention to one of the strategies that can be used during the user adoption process. The book provides 20 to 30 of these strategies, and takes the same approach to each of them. Here is the section from the Enlivening Applicability stage for Over-the-Shoulder Watching.
Spending time one-to-one with someone in their office or cubicle is a great way to cultivate insights about how they really work. It is also a key strategy for user adoption.
One-to-one Over-the-Shoulder Watching:
Provides a way to see how an individual is working today.
Encourages the individual to explore new collaboration technology capabilities.
Allows the individual to overcome current pain points.
Helps the individual to improve their work and become more efficient and effective.
By becoming immersed in someone’s work world, you can tailor your advice and direction in appropriate ways.
Over-the-Shoulder Watching requires a delicate balance of observing how people work and directing them to work in new ways. It’s a form of coaching, for the modern age.
The Over-the-Shoulder Watching strategy involves:
Observing someone working in his or her office. Look for common activities done on a regular basis, especially those activities they do in conjunction with other people.
Ask for permission to interrupt the person to clarify what you are observing. This will allow you to develop a deeper understanding of why they do particular things.
Note that someone outside the group or company may be required to do this work. Someone too closely tied to the way work is done today—the workarounds, the excuses, the established way of doing things—will miss things an outsider will pick up quickly.
Many types of IT projects can benefit from Over-the-Shoulder Watching. It is very effective (see the survey data results below), but is very expensive! Here are some examples of when it may be worth spending the money:
When you are trying to understand the group. Early investments in Over-the-Shoulder Watching will provide a clear sense of the type of work being done. These insights can be used during subsequent engagement sessions.
With opinion leaders within a team or group. Working with opinion leaders to understand their work and give coaching may result in them taking the message to the rest of the team or group.
With people who are hard to convince. Personal attention and coaching may help people who have resisted the new changes. While doing Over-the-Shoulder Watching and coaching, you can connect the work they’re doing with the wider organization. For example, you could mention how the executive team is using these new capabilities, or how the sales and marketing groups have started to do so.
Over-the-shoulder watching works for many reasons:
It gives personal attention. One person (the watcher/coach) spends some time—from 30 minutes to up to a couple of hours—sitting with one person and observes what they do. What tasks are they working on? How do they handle working with others? What tools are they using? How well are they using them? Based on what the watcher sees, coaching is provided about next learning steps.
It conveys importance. Having a watcher/coach show up at your desk, and sit to observe and provide helpful comments conveys the tremendous importance of what’s going on.
It provides tangible next steps. The lessons learned by the watcher/coach can be translated into tangible ideas for a person to work on. It essentially gives the person an individualized development plan to work on in relation to the new collaboration technology.
It offers a validation and feedback loop. Spending time one-to-one gives an opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of earlier training and engagement sessions. Are people getting the message? Are they recalling the steps involved? Are they making the transition?
The table below shows that more than 50 percent of survey respondents used Over-the-Shoulder Watching as part of their user adoption approach.
Of those respondents using Over-the-Shoulder Watching, 61% said it was “very helpful” or “extremely helpful” in their user adoption approach.
The Over-the-Shoulder Watching strategy—also called “one-to-one coaching”—was noted as one of the most effective strategies for encouraging user adoption! This was true for respondents from small and large organizations.
The following themes emerged from survey comments:
One-time interventions are less effective than using one-to-one coaching (in its various forms) as a sustained effort over time. If the user is visited once and then ignored, change in behavior is not going to take place.
One-to-one coaching works best as part of an overall user adoption process—which is the focus of this book and the Four Stages Model of User Adoption.
What works well for user adoption on SharePoint has worked for other tools in the past. This means you can reduce the risk within your SharePoint user adoption strategy by leveraging lessons and successful approaches from previous endeavors.
You can learn more about the book at http://www.useradoptionstrategies.com/.