Getting Employees On Board with UC

September 11, 2015 by

To a significant degree, the argument in favor of unified communications seems like a no-brainer. With UC, a company can improve its employees' collaboration and communication abilities, leading to superior flexibility, efficiency, effectiveness, and job satisfaction, all while reducing operating costs. Given all of this, it's easy to see why so many corporate leaders have eagerly embraced UC tools for their workforces.

However, the situation becomes less straightforward when viewed from the employees' perspective. In many cases, workers will be far less eager to incorporate UC into their work routines than business leaders might hope. The fact of the matter is that most people prefer to stick with the familiar, rather than take a chance on tools or solutions that they have little experience with. And if employees do not fully accept and embrace UC, then the technology will not deliver the hoped-for value.

With that in mind, here are four steps business leaders can take to help bring their employees on board with the notion of UC usage.

1. Understanding the Technology

First and foremost, business leaders can work to overcome employees' resistance to UC simply by helping them to better understand the technology. While the concept of UC may seem straightforward and intuitive to many people, it's fairly foreign to many others, especially older workers. Anyone who does not truly understand what UC is and what it does may feel overwhelmed, and this can cause them to avoid the tools altogether.

With a robust, user-friendly overview, though, employees can see UC as a natural evolution of their existing tools and processes, rather than a radical change. This will make it easier for many workers to make the first step complete adoption.

2. Exploring the Potential

Beyond explaining UC basics to personnel, business leaders should also go further and help their employees discover the unexpected benefits that the technology has to offer. UC's most basic features are fairly obvious with a quick overview - these confer the ability to connect with internal and external contacts quickly and easily through a variety of channel options. Yet one of the greatest advantages that UC has to offer is a wide range of less immediately apparent features that can improve productivity and efficiency in numerous subtle but significant ways.

For example, many novice users may not realize that the available UC platform can be used to send and receive files. Others may not know they can switch between screen shares during a video conference. And still other workers won't know that they can use their office phone numbers for their mobile devices, simplifying and improving client communications.

Once they understand these benefits, employees will be far more eager to accept UC.

3. Ongoing Training

To further improve the workforce's use of UC, it's not enough for company leaders to provide support and guidance during deployment. Instead, ongoing training must be a priority. With regular, focused training sessions, decision-makers can ensure that employees genuinely understand how to best leverage the available solutions. If the training is limited to the early days of the technology's implementation, however, it is very likely that some of that valuable information provided will be lost over the coming weeks and months. Additionally, ongoing training will serve as a reminder of UC's value.

4. Proof

Finally, business leaders should make a point of providing proof of UC's utility for their workers. This can be easily accomplished through the use of UC analytics. With robust metrics, managers can show their workers concrete evidence of the gains that UC provides as time goes on.

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