How to help employees embrace digital working

Some small business workers can be reluctant to use new digital tools and systems, but clear communication and reassurance can bridge the gap.

Phones, cars, paperwork – it feels like there’s not much left that can’t be digitised or made better, faster or stronger through technology.

However, we're not all adapting to this new digital age at the same rate. For every “digital native” who thinks that coding a website is a walk in the park, there’s a less technologically-inclined person who finds setting up their smartphone to receive emails daunting and difficult.

Technophobic team members are an issue if you’re a growing business that wants to implement changes across the whole company. Here’s how three SMEs approached it.

Digital shopping

Boxtopia is a box packaging solutions company based in Grantham, Lincolnshire. It started out by working with local clients, but as it grew beyond its borders, the team realised that it would need an e-commerce website.

“The website design and development process was quite daunting, because we didn’t know how to grow an online presence,” says general manager Rowena Perrott.

“We’ve since learnt that with technology, people have to understand how new processes can be used as tools to help facilitate growth, however scary they seem.” For example, thanks to digital data collected via the site, the company now has a better understanding of the customer journey, which it can use to improve online and offline processes. Communicating that to staff shows them that a tech-based change is a genuine effort to improve the business – not a pointless, flashy new toy.

Once the website was completed, the next challenge was to familiarise the team with it. The company took all of its staff on an away-day to meet the web developers, learn about the site’s functionality and ask any queries in person.

More tech, more time

Clifton St Annes, a residential care home service in North Yorkshire, recently moved all of its paper records online. With the family-owned business centred on the happiness and wellbeing of each resident, it needed a software solution that enabled its 100 workers to easily record delivered care as and when it happens.

"We introduced Caresys Mobile [a care home management software solution] for smartphones and tablets. We wanted technology to reduce the admin burden on our staff, so that they could spend more time with residents," explains managing director Lou Squires. "Now staff have clear and accurate information live at their fingertips, unlike when we used what now seems like a vulnerable and inefficient system.”

With most people already familiar with smartphones and tablets, uptake wasn’t a concern. However, some employees had worries about accidentally deleting important data, damaging the tablets, and whether residents might think they were using the tech to play games rather than record care plans.

Will Craig, Digital Impact

"We took a phased approach, implementing it for a few months at one home first, before rolling it out at the other. We also introduced fun training sessions to get everyone up to speed," recalls Ms Squires. "We also reassured staff about security issues, deleting data and inevitable wear and tear."

Communication has helped make the company’s move across to digital a resounding success. By tackling concerns head-on and in light-hearted ways, the switch has been straightforward.

Heading into the cloud

For Digital Impact, a web agency that's used to working digitally, it wasn’t so much the fear of technology that was hindering business; it was concern over change.  

“We moved to cloud-based versions of all our daily tools. We started by replacing Microsoft Office with Google Docs, and our six-year-old server with Google Drive,” says managing director Will Craig.
“We didn’t expect there to be much resistance, because the digital industry completely reinvents itself on a regular basis, but there were a few objections to moving the whole agency across.”

Consistency is important when it comes to cloud computing. If a company is operating under more than one system, formatting problems and tracking issues can occur in documents, for example, which wastes time and adds unnecessary work. Knowing this, Mr Craig made sure that everyone was confident enough to use just one agreed system throughout the business.  

“People couldn’t just switch over to a new service at the blink of an eye, so beforehand, we rolled out our cloud service, we let people play around with it and get to know it,” he recalls. “To avoid two systems running at the same time, we set isolated dummy tasks on the new system, which allowed everyone to practice our processes and workflows without worrying about the knock-on consequences of getting something wrong.”

Once everyone knew how to use the services, the company set a date to start using it and stuck to it, making sure that all staff members knew that the old services wouldn’t be accepted beyond that point.

It went smoothly, but Mr Craig advises other SME owners to be careful: “You’ve got to think about how your business works now, how its existing services fit into that structure, and whether potential cloud alternatives will slot in seamlessly. Otherwise you risk disrupting processes if the new services don't fit.”

Learn to earn

Research shows that more than 90pc of jobs will require digital literacy in the near future and that small companies grow twice as fast when they have a strong web presence. It’s crucial that employers and employees stay up to date in terms of skills.

And adopting these skills needn’t be expensive; there are lots of free and low-cost training opportunities out there. One example is Google’s Digital Garage courses service, which has trained more than 250,000 people in the UK in essential digital skills for free. This year, the service is offering five hours of free digital skills training to all UK residents online and in 100 locations around the country.

Overcoming a tech-phobia or digital reluctance isn’t simple, but by continually taking small steps, being understanding, and investing time and money into training, SMEs can make sure their workforce has the vital skills to grow as a business in the digital age.