Why Won't Anyone Use my Smartsheet App?

Implementing any new process or application will always require management of some level of resistance. Implementation of a new Smartsheet Application is no exception. You can maximize your chance of successful implementation by anticipating and proactively managing resistance to change.

Understanding the factors that drive resistance is an important part of this process, but the first step is simply understanding that most employees are reasonable human beings who want to do good work and feel valued. As such, they likely understand that their processes can use improvement and would probably love to gain efficiencies and become more productive. So where is the resistence coming from? Well, change comes with risk and risk makes people uncomfortable.

When you are trying to implement a new business process or tool, the root causes of resistance tend to be related to one of two themes:

1. The employee is concerned that you are going to negatively effect their productivity

2. The proposed change has threatened or damaged their ego

Risks to Productivity

From your perspective, you’ve designed a brilliant, new time-saving application that is going to boost productivity and save the company hours of time each week. Unfortunately, if you haven’t managed change effectively, you might be the only one to see it that way when you are ready to implement.

A major root cause of change resistance is failure to see the value in the proposed change. Busy employees are constantly trying to find time in the day to get their most important work done. Activities that aren't considered important or value-added will always be pushed to the bottom of the never-ending list. You need to ensure that your leadership team and end-users see the potential benefits of your new application as being worth their time to learn and adopt. It is particularly important that leadership endorses your application if you might ultimately be asking your colleagues to perform new tasks. You need to be able to confidently and convincingly articlate the benefits to the organization that make the cost worth the effort to get buy-in from your more hesitant end-users.

Convincing your colleagues that the application has value is a critical starting point, but it's not enough to actually get them to adopt the change.

Your colleagues have work to do and have already established routines that ensure they get their work done on time. They trust their routines and if you want them to adopt your application, they need to trust that it will work just as well or better than their existing process. If you've left room for doubt, you might be met with some serious resistence to changing their workflow because the risk of failing to get everything done will outweigh the possible benefit your Smartsheet Application may have on efficiency.

Likewise, if your colleageus don't feel sufficiently prepared to begin using the application, they might be reluctant to try. Learning a new process or tool takes time. Time is valuable to busy people who have deadlines to meet. You need to invest time in providing both technical training and in helping your end-users figure out how to incorporate your new application into their existing workflows if you want to be successful.

Finally, previous experience with business improvement projects might impact attitude towards change. An employee who has experienced repeated or recent failed attempts to change their processes in the past might be quick to assume that this shiny new application is bound to fail too. If they don't trust that this new tool will ever fully cross the finish line, they might be reluctant to waste time and effort on trying to use it.

Risks to Ego

It’s easy to understand when a risk to productivity is the root cause of resistance to change. If asked, your colleagues will likely share their concerns on how the change might impact them or their team. Unfortunately, the relationship between resistance to change and ego is more nuanced and can be more difficult to uncover as the root cause of resistance.

First, let's remember that most employees want to do good work and feel valued. Extending that further, most employees want to be perceived postively by their colleagues and many will develop a sense of ownership of the processes they routinely perform.

Changing a process, at its core, implies that the original process was deficient. Some employees will take the implied criticism of “their” process personally, especially if they were involved in the design of the original tool or process. As a result, they might feel like a successful change will somehow decrease their value or other’s perception of them. Afterall, they've been performing a suboptimal process without implementing an improvement as good as your new application all this time.

Other employees may feel slighted and resist adoption of your application if they were not properly consulted prior to or during development. Be sure to seek approval and input from all appropriate stakeholders and seek extra engagement from the users who will be impacted the most. This can be particularly important when working with someone who played a significant role in designing or implementing the original tool or process.

Finally, some users will resist using your application for the simple fact that they don't like being told what to do. If you suspect that a key stakeholder might fall into this category, you may need to spend some extra time engaging with that stakeholder to really win their buy-in organically so that your actions are never perceived as trying to "make" them do anything.

Conclusions

New Smartsheet Developers who have never engaged in business process optimization might be blind-sided by resistence to change the first time they try to release a new application. The key to good change management is to begin managing resistence before you start development. Identify your stakeholders early and engage with them frequently. The more you learn about their personalities and specific concerns, the better you will be able to proactively manage any resistance that might otherwise slow or halt implementation of your new Smartsheet application.