Why all the reluctance? Niche is better than all-in-one for collaborative tools

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Owner of this photo is Flickr user Allan Foster. Original location of the image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/foshydog/4589457270
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Almost 70 percent of a manager’s ideas are doomed from the very start. Employees cover their ears and wait for the sonic bang to fade away. As a species, human beings suffer from chronic laziness: if something kinda-sorta-maybe works, why bother changing it? Here’s how oungou teach them about collaboration and collaborative tools. And save time and money.

We could sugar-coat it but the essence remains: people hate changes. They are skeptical and focus rather on what they have to lose. “What will happen to me?”, “How will this affect my job?” they ask themselves.

We read four different studies, all of them revolving around 70 percent, the number of change initiatives that are bound to fail due to the reluctance of the employees.

Researchers Pat Zigarmi and Judd Hoekstra at The Ken Blanchard Companies believe that while this number is frightening, there are ways to implement change at work. After all, Darwin taught us the same thing: in today’s tech jungle where giant companies rise and fall, we need to adapt in order to survive.

Past failures build reluctance in trying new tools

A key aspect of change is to ask and observe why your team is afraid of. For some, this fear is connected to a track record of failures that fall in the same category. General collaborative tools tend to generate more resistance, especially from younger employees, as they don’t have any patience for lousy workplace software.

General collaboration software tend to have too many built-in features as they want to come up with solutions for everything. However, why go for the whole Big Mac when you only need the pickles within? General collaborative software solutions are like multi-purpose tools: fairly good at a lot of things, but not always user-wise enough when it comes to details.

How to ensure a smooth change

Niche products on the other hand target specific processes, making it easier for employees to see the benefits shortly. Take for instance Slack. Not even its founder Stewart Butterfiled can explain the adoption boom – but allow me to share two of the most important aspects: it’s a niche one (messaging) and it offers an excellent UX.

Just as Slack tries to get internal communication out of email, Quandora aims to do the same when it comes to knowledge sharing. And we try to that by providing an easy to use but dynamic Q&A platform – no necessary trainings, no noisy features: you ask questions and colleagues help you with the answers.

No matter the collaborative tool your organization would like to deploy internally, as long as everyone sees the advantages, the adoption should be simple and the transition smooth.

When people help each other rather than competing against each other, your company evolves the most. Employees support themselves, and the annual party held in December won’t feel like scheduled fun with a bunch of damn-that-arrogant-guy colleagues.

If you carefully discuss the benefits of any new software with your team, if you tell them that their contribution and their efforts will be even more visible, this initiative will fall into the 30 percent of the successful changes.

Happy Knowledge Sharing!

Looking for a great way to ask questions and build knowledge with your co-workers? Quandora enables simple, efficient knowledge sharing with your team, way more fun than a mailing list or a forum. Try Quandora

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