Business intelligence (BI) tools facilitate workflows, increase productivity, and can be invaluable to your bottom line.
However, not all employees are ready to dive into new technology. Many may even show resistance to adopting BI tools in their daily tasks, leading to potential deliverable delays, silos, and a lower ROI for businesses that have invested in these tools.
Business intelligence is a growing field, and the fact is that it remains unknown to many employees. This is why decision-makers have to take the lead when it comes to adopting BI and show staff how it can benefit their jobs.
In this post, we’ll explore several strategies you can use to encourage your team to adopt business intelligence tools.
Offer Personalized Training
Personalized training is key when it comes to onboarding any business intelligence software into a company. It’s one thing to offer a broad overview and another entirely to connect employees with the features and capabilities that will make their work more efficient. Personalized training, such as through a learning management system (LMS), or group-based coaching, can facilitate greater BI adoption.
Make sure that when you work with a new software provider, they offer excellent customer support. Whenever someone has questions, they should be able to reach out to the team and get personalized care.
It’s equally important that managers are well-trained in any new business intelligence tools before they are given to employees. This can reduce errors and streamline the integration process because there is less of a learning curve to overcome.
Highlight Role-Specific Benefits
When people realize how a business intelligence tool can help them personally, they are more likely to use it in their daily lives. Maybe you highlight how a dashboard can make report generation a breeze for marketers, or you showcase the way dynamic data collection can improve sales teams’ success.
It’s equally important for your organization to recognize the benefits and challenges each team faces when adopting a new tool. Conduct a cost-benefits analysis for each department to ensure that you are choosing software that will be genuinely beneficial to them.
Identify Pain Points
What do your teams struggle with the most? Ask your team to identify their current obstacles, and see how they tie into the organization’s greater struggles. These could be silos impacting productivity or frequent errors that need to be reduced. Technology can be a barrier or a facilitator to success, but it requires understanding your organization’s needs as well as the cross-functional compatibility of your teams.
When you recognize what each department needs individually, it becomes easier to find solutions that offer overarching benefits for the entire company. Moreover, recognizing pain points allows you to tie business intelligence solutions directly where they are likely to be the most impactful.
Establish Goals Together
Clear goals allow everyone to feel united as they work toward a common objective. Goals are best when they are measurable and time-specific but be mindful of restrictions that could place undue pressure on employees.
Instead, try to be open with your team and work on setting clear goals together. What do they theywant to do better in their jobs, and how can business intelligence tools help them get there?
If you want to encourage others to adopt software, it’s helpful to align their usage with a goal. This gives them incentive to try the tool even if it is initially more challenging than their previous method of working.
Have Routine Check-ins
Weekly check-ins can help teams get used to new business intelligence tools. A round-house-style meeting where people are encouraged to share their challenges, celebrate accomplishments, and ask questions is a good way to foster a collaborative learning environment. Management can also benefit from these meetings by using the conversations as an opportunity to gather feedback and assess the ROI of the software being used.
Promote Knowledge Sharing in Using Business Intelligence Tools
Knowledge sharing promotes an inclusive workspace and can be a beneficial team-building exercise. It can even span across departments and be a part of your company’s larger cross-functional communication strategy. There are many knowledge sharing tools and knowledge base platforms that help employees learn from one another.
How to Encourage Teams to Use Business Intelligence Tools
Managers should be patient and strategic as they integrate new tools into their teams’ workflows. It is important to offer simple yet detailed onboarding to ensure new tools are introduced as a benefit rather than a “necessary evil.” This will help reduce employee resistance and promote a greater interest in using the software.
Incentive programs can also be helpful for teams that are less receptive to new technology. Reward employees for using data to solve problems and make decisions. Recognition can have a two-fold benefit in this case; it makes the employee feel valued and appreciated while showing others the advantages of relying on business intelligence data.
Empowering Teams with Accessible Insights: DashboardFox
Integrating business intelligence can be transformative, but true success lies in ensuring your team can easily leverage its power. DashboardFox is designed to bridge this gap, offering an intuitive, codeless platform that empowers both team leaders and employees to harness data-driven insights.
A key for adoption is to pick a user friendly tool. DashboardFox was designed with business users in mind first, not technical users or developers. This makes all areas of the product, from the administration to the dashboard operation easier to use.
DashboardFox is also an ad-hoc, self-service, no-code application. That’s a lot of buzz words, but it means it’s designed for how business users typically operate, they have a question, they want to quickly pull a report or data fact without having to tie in with IT or development to build it for them. They can do it themselves.
And perhaps equally important, DashboardFox was designed with the cost in mind. These days organizations are expected to spend more for BI than it may be hard to justify as an intenal operations tool. We always say, BI should cost more than the value you receive from it. With DashboardFox we have a one-time payment, not a subscription. So this allows you to get started affordably and the return on investment just grows over time.
Ready to see how DashboardFox can unlock the full potential of your team? Try a free live demo or book a meeting with our team to discuss your specific needs. Together, we can transform your business intelligence journey into a shared success story.