Why Your Employees Aren't Using Your [insert technology here]

Employees don’t need another thing to do. They’ve already got plenty on their plates – just ask. And yet, the majority of Facebook users find time to check in with their social network during the workday. That’s because they want to...we all know we're more inclined to do things when we want to.

Yet, when we talk to clients about the communication advantages of using social media within their organizations, we are often met with the following question:

"Isn’t that just another thing people will have to do?"

Usually that question comes from people who have been burned before…usually by a corporate intranet that never lived up to its promise. 

And this is where I apply the same principal to internal social tools as I do to intranets: If you’re spending all your time trying to convince people to use it, then you haven’t made it useful enough.

We’re talking about a captive audience here – you know who they are and even where they are (at least some of the time). It is within your power to identify their needs and preferences and then create your communication strategy – including the supporting technology – accordingly. Really, it is.

Sure, there’s going to be an adoption phase in the beginning when you’re introducing something new and you need to build awareness, but if you’re more than six months in and the crux of your strategy is still “Get more people to use it,” then something’s not working.

If nobody is using the new social tool you implemented, there are three possible reasons:

1. You didn’t start by identifying the problem you were trying to solve. (And no, “We don’t have any internal social media,” does not count as a problem to solve.)
2. You identified a problem, but the “solution” you delivered didn’t solve it. (A variation on this is that you didn't properly educate people on how it solves the problem.)
3. The solution you delivered sucks – as in, it’s hard to use.

Once you’ve figured out which of these three reasons applies to you, it’s time to take the energy you’ve been putting into begging people to get on board, and start working on creating something so useful and intuitive that “have to” never even enters into the equation – they’ll use it because they want to.

(Btw, Cast doesn’t implement technical solutions, but we know how to be great partners to IT.)