Employee adoption of your internal communication tools and programs are essential to getting the most value out of your investment and truly making any difference within your workforce. If you are looking to get a new program off the ground in your company, like a private podcast program, take the following tips into account to ensure strong adoption.

Set Adoption Goals.

With any new program in your business, it’s important to set adoption goals and establish benchmarks to ensure you are tracking towards success. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to setting goals, take a look at what adoption looks like in other programs and similar technologies within your company. When was the last time you rolled out a new internal communication tool in your company? Was that successful? These are great questions to consider when setting adoption goals for your new program.

Consider if Your Program Enhances Your Employee Experience.

If a new program or tool enhances your employee experience, your workers will be more likely to adopt, ultimately strengthening your work culture and overall business performance. Before you introduce any new program or technology into your company, consider its experience.

For example, with a medium like a private podcast, there will be no new habits for your employees to learn, as approximately 80 million Americans are already weekly podcast listeners. uStudio’s private podcasting solution is fully customizable and works like the consumer podcasting apps your employees already love and know how to use, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. As a mobile-first provider, the ease of our technology supports employee adoption. And, with a subscription-based program, no effort is needed for listeners to find appropriate podcast content.

Leverage resources.

Resources for your employees, such as onboarding materials, can help to ensure they adopt your new program and stay educated with its benefits. If you are introducing a new tool to your workforce, make sure your workers are trained on how to sign-in and use it. Many providers offer custom resources to help with adoption - here at uStudio, that includes end-user application guides, live webinars, blog posts with best practices, Guided Services workshops, tutorial videos and more. At the end of the day, it’s important that your company knows what to expect out of the implementation process and how to interact with your new program.

Track installation and usage.

In today’s data-driven world, if you can’t measure it then it doesn’t matter. It’s important that you continually track program adoption to ensure growth and prove ROI to your leadership. Measuring program adoption post-launch can also help determine how successful your launch or original implementation period was. This is easy if your new program or software offers enterprise-grade, named-user analytics, like uStudio’s private podcast solution.

For uStudio customers, our analytics dashboard can be used to track adoption company-wide all the way down to the individual user. If you have members who should be using the tool but are not, it would be worthwhile to dig into why. This can be done by simply asking the individual why they are not listening to the podcast, or contacting their manager for feedback.

Once your organization has reached its adoption goal, it will be even more important to take note of engagement metrics to ensure employees are responding well and engaging with your program. From there, you can make slight changes within the program based on employee preferences to make certain they stay engaged time and time again.

Identify internal champions and encourage leadership support.

In many cases, your program will not be successful unless it has the support to grow within your enterprise. Internal champions can help to influence change amongst peers and get other employees motivated and excited about any new program. After launching a new piece of software, if your analytics show one group of users are engaging with the tool more than others, they might be great early adopters to lean on throughout implementation. What’s more, reward those early adopters to let them know you appreciate their engagement. Here at uStudio, we also recommend sending pre-launch communications to leadership teams to get them on board with any changes. Employees will be more likely to partake in something their boss is asking them to do.

To improve the rate of program adoption it’s important to involve your employees quickly and continually ask them for feedback. At the end of the day, they need to be educated on why you are making any sort of internal change within your business. Questions about launching a private podcast program for your enterprise? Contact the uStudio team today!