Changing IT Behavior
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"At Eurocol one of the challenges is to adopt Office 365 in the company. Therefore, each employee and manager of Eurocol should change his or her behavior for working with Office 365 instead of older software. How can we realize such a change?
In this booklet, Albert Makhanlal, an expert in OBM, a modern change technology and R. Sigmond of Forbo Eurocol describe how they successfully implemented OBM for realizing this behavioral change"
On this page you’ll find the summary of the case study. Upon request we will be glad to send you the full case study. Just send us a message via Linkedin.
The Challenge: from email to collaboration
Nowadays, technology and Artificial Intelligence based team management tools are growing faster than the ability of people to adapt. Trying to adapt means that users must change their behavior in order to keep up with these technology changes. In the case outlined in this paper, users stick to their email and are unaware of the possibilities of new collaborative tooling that Microsoft Office 365[1] offers them. We need to explain the capabilities of the tooling to the users , encourage their usage and look for ways to reinforce that behavior.
Forbo Eurocol Nederland is always on top on new technology to improve quality and productivity so management recognizes the fact that by using more collaborative tooling, the productivity of each employee can be increased. The use of Office365 throughout the organization will be beneficial to the users in reaching their targets and goals. However, it is difficult to change the behavior of an organization from an email-driven company to a more efficient collaborative one.
Approach: the power of positive reinforcement
The user adoption of Office 365 tooling in order to increase user productivity is all about changing the behavior of users. That is why we chose to apply the knowledge of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM). This methodology is aimed at behavioral change by applying the power of positive reinforcement. Moreover, this scientifically proven method is based on more than 60,000 use cases worldwide. For the application of this method, we used the eight-step protocol as designed by Rietdijk (2009)[2]. This protocol is part of the OBM Practitioner Training.
We started by assessing the business processes and then continued by taken a closer look at the habits of users during their daily work. The power of positive reinforcement is used to establish behavioral change. Finding the ‘what’s in it for me’ component has been proven to be a key factor in this improvement process. Antecedents have been recognized and consequences have been determined in order to achieve the correct behavioral change that leads to the required result.
Result: collaboration culture
After one year of user adoption, most users are now using the Office365 platform which has led to more and efficient collaboration within groups. The number of short messages communicated over email has been greatly reduced. Instead, the Microsoft Teams-chat has become the preferred application to send messages to coworkers. Project and departmental communication/collaboration takes place in Microsoft Teams whenever possible. The Microsoft application Planner is now used to manage group tasks.
If you are interested in the full case study send a linkedin message.
[1] Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Teams are trademarks of Microsoft.
[2] Rietdijk, M.M. (2009). Gedragsverandering in organisaties. Hoe het beste van mensen gedaan te krijgen. Assen. Van Gorcum.
