Nudging Teams adoption

[petermalling]

Anybody using nudging principles in driving adoption of Teams?

[#2]

See for instance: https://coolerinsights.com/2009/09/a-gentle-nudge-is-all-thats-needed/

[#3]

@petermallingUsing nudging principles in user adoption is complex. As behavioral scientists will tell you, nudging works really well, but only at the moment the user or customer is making his or her decision. In our daily work most of the actions we do have become a force of habit; it's not a conscious decision anymore and therefore very difficult to influence through nudging. 

There are good ways to drive adoption without 'forcing' users to work in a different way, though. The Champions program advocated by Microsoft does that to some extent. In our company we put users in the lead even more. Through a tailored program we help teams that apply (i.e. want to change their way of working) to adopt MS Teams properly and really change their way of working to be more collaborative. Teams that don't want to, don't have to make the switch. 

Driving adoption this way is slower than the mass-switch, but the results are really staggering:

• we see drasticly higher reduction in email between team members for teams that have gone through the program. In addition sentiment and atmosphere within the teams as well as collaboration and knowledge sharing have improved markedly.
• we see virtually no negative emotions surrounding MS Teams as people want  to use the tool, learn how to use the tool properly and have together agreed on the 'rules and guidelines' for using MS Teams. 
• other teams are influenced by the enthusiasm of team that have gone before, causing a ripple effect.  (you could call this a form of nudging 😉 )

[#4]

@Sandra Baltissen Thanks a lot for your quick and elaborate reply! Highly appriciated, and very inspiring to hear about your approach, which is similar to the route, we're looking at.

I think that exactly braking unwanted habits is one of the strongest virtues of nudging. Smaller plates in the canteen to make people make the right choice about portion size (braking habit of big portions). Making it easy to make the "right" choice and difficult to make the "wrong" choice will eventually push people down the "right" lane, without even noticing it, in a gentle and non-pushy way.

Why shouldn't it be possible to nudge people to use Teams? It's indeed a choice, teams make, when they choose to use mail, DropBox, Google Docs, fileshares, Slack etc. to communicate. It's in these situations that we want to grasp peoples attention and gently route them into creating a MS Team rather than making a folder on e.g. Dropbox. We're considering for instance a URL redirect, that will pop up a window giving people the choice of Teams, when they try to go to Dropbox in their browser. Likewise, by putting a link direktly to creating a team on the desktop, we also make it easy to do the right thing. Just a few examples, but there must be plenty of such opportunities to nudge people into using Teams rather than less wanted alternatives.

Thanks again for responding. I'm new to this forum, nice to have like minded people to interact with.

/Peter.

[#5]

Hi Peter,
Nudge theory is something I am very much interested in but like yourself I have been struggling to find proven examples of its application to software adoption.

One solution that impressed me was SWOOP  Behavioural change with nudges (Workplace) – SWOOP Analytics which might be of interest to read. Hope this helps. Best Regards Liam