Picture this: the CFO signed off on you purchasing new software, so you vetted 6 vendors, aligned on a chosen partner, sat through 11 sales calls, called 4 reference customers, and finally closed the deal after 2 rounds of legal redlines. Here’s where the fun starts, and that awesome new PropTech solution that promised to “completely reinvent your operations” starts to completely reinvent your operations…right? Reality is, you won’t see the impact until your onsite teams are bought in and actually start using the platform—and who knows when that will be?
Multifamily leaders know that getting onsite teams bought in is almost always easier said than done. And what’s the key to driving onsite buy-in? Change management best practices. The EliseAI Education Team has plenty of those, derived from our learnings supporting over 500 operators around the country during complicated rollouts, companies spanning from 1,000 unit owner/operators to 120,000 unit fee managers and everything in between.
Today, Samantha Oliver, Senior Customer Training Specialist and Laurence Hardie, Customer Education Specialist, are here to share 7 key change management best practices they've learned from their experiences in the field.
.svg)
1. Start with the “Why?”
Learning new technology, whether for work or for pleasure, is almost always a daunting experience. Less tech savvy members of your team will feel that pain even more acutely. What causes that anxiety? Uncertainty—uncertainty about why the new tool is being rolled out, what the purpose is, and how it will impact them. If you can answer one simple question, the “why” behind the initiative, you’ll find that concern melts away in favor of acceptance.
.png)
In our experience, we’ve found that highlighting the following reasons “why” you’re rolling out AI can be very effective in creating buy-in:
- Why use AI to automate transactional conversations? Because they eat up tons of time in your day to day.
- Why use AI to automate transactional conversations? Because it allows you to focus on high-value, strategic conversations.
- Why use AI to automate transactional conversations? Because it ensures every single lead gets a timely response.
Teams who are bought in on the motivation behind the “why” tend to be much more receptive to learning new tech, because it eliminates uncertainty and mitigates any concerns they have about the technology negatively impacting their role.
2. Communicate What Is Staying the Same
While taking on a new tool requires new ways of working, helping teams understand what’s NOT changing is almost as important as training them on what’s going to change. Start by examining and clearly documenting exactly how the new tool or process will impact your teams’ workflows from beginning to end, so that you can clearly understand what’s changing and what’s staying the same. Once you’ve established a clear understanding, you can move onto identifying what the largest pain points are going to be, as well as constants that you can hold onto and emphasize during the process.
By helping teams to understand what’s not changing, you free them up to focus specifically on new information. This can also help reduce anxiety around what’s changing, and reinforce that your teams already have extensive prior knowledge to draw on as they adapt to new tools and workflows. Making sure your teams have confidence in themselves is key, and communicating what is going to stay the same helps them reinforce that confidence.
3. Empower Your Champions
One of the quickest ways to get your team excited about learning a new technology? Sharing social proof early and often. The best way to create social proof? Identifying and empowering your champions early in any tech rollout.
If you have chronic “early adopters” on your team, give them access to the new solution early. This is a great way to gather feedback that will help shape how you train the rest of your teams. These team members will turn into your internal “subject matter experts” and help the rest of the team get on board. If you ran a pilot, you can leverage those early experiences to showcase the impact the product is already having across the organization. Empower and encourage your champions to share success stories! When their peers see applicable use cases in action, they can start to visualize how this tech will fit into their day to day.
In the context of AI, pulling and sharing examples of automated conversations that would previously have been handled by your team can help create buy-in and encourage people to trust the tool. This is not only a great step to drum up initial interest, but can also be used to reinforce long term success when incorporated into things like monthly newsletters or team stand ups. Those personable, human-driven interactions go a long way when trying to garner buy in!
4. Mix It Up a Bit
.png)
Everyone learns differently. With that in mind, it’s important to recognize that there is not going to be a “one size fits all” training model for your team. Make sure to keep your training sessions interactive as well! While it is great to have a well rehearsed presentation, make sure you allow time in your training for live demos and questions to make the learning experience a two-way street.
After leading a live training make sure you share resources that your teams can use for continued learning, because everyone learns at their own pace. Most vendors are happy to provide helpful resources— for example, EliseAI has a robust Help Center full of actionable insights, training resources and how-to guides.
5. Solicit Feedback Early and Often
Your initial training is obviously the start of the onboarding journey, but making sure that your teams know that their insights are valued is just as important. The key to a successful implementation? Giving your team members a clear, well defined path to submit feedback and to ask questions when they’re uncertain.
What does the best channel look like? It depends! We’ve seen some clients during EliseAI rollouts set up an internal email chain, a dedicated chat channel, or even a Google form to continue to raise these questions and share their thoughts. If you don’t have an established feedback channel prior to your initial training, you might end up spending a large portion of your time answering configuration and edge use case questions.
When you’re rolling out EliseAI products, baking feedback into your EliseAI configuration is a helpful way to drive buy-in for AI by allowing teams to see the impact they’re having on the tool. Teams are always going to be more receptive to training when they know their feedback will help to customize the tech they use.
6. Track Key Success Indicators
.png)
Like any successful initiative, you need to measure the impact of your training efforts. Ensure you’re monitoring key indicators that can help you assess if additional support is needed. While qualitative feedback from checking in with your teams is undeniably important, it won’t necessarily tell the whole story because, sadly, sometimes teams just don’t know what they don’t know!
Keeping track of measurable metrics can help you proactively identify and address training concerns without having to rely on teams to surface issues. Consider what metrics will best indicate that the team understands what they need to do, and are following through on the new workflows. For example, when rolling out AI products we often look at the number of open tasks outstanding to measure how well the rollout is going. A high number of open tasks could indicate that the team does not know how to respond to handoffs from their AI assistant, or doesn’t understand the importance and value of responding to handoffs—both of which are training concerns that should be quickly addressed.
7. Accept That Training Is an Ongoing Process
Training is never a one-and-done thing—we’re all learning new things every single day! With that in mind, it’s important to think of training as an ongoing, iterative process. While it’s important to provide quality training when bringing in a new tool or changing a workflow, it’s just as key to provide ongoing training support so that teams receive up to date information and have an opportunity to raise new questions or concerns.
We recommend that all EliseAI users plan regular refresher training sessions so teams can ask questions and stay up to date on any new product or workflow updates. Use feedback from earlier training sessions to further refine your training content and strategy because, like we said in point 3, what works for some won’t work for all. By creating a culture of learning at your organization, like starting a monthly “lunch and learn” series or a “training hour” that recurs on a regular basis, you create opportunities to give a voice to experts within your organization and provide professional development and upskilling opportunities for your team.
Consider how you will incorporate new platforms and tools into your onboarding process as well. While you’ve trained up your current team, new joiners will also need to be trained and set up for success. It can help to create a training library or resource center where teams can go to get answers to questions and self-serve information, both for new joiners and for veterans of your team. This could be as simple as linking out to resources provided by a partner, or as complex as creating a Center of Excellence for your organization.
Setting Your Team Up for Success with EliseAI
Unlike other vendors that ghost as soon as you sign a contract, the EliseAI Education and Customer Success teams will be there every step of the way as you roll out AI across your organization. Interested in learning more about EliseAI’s products (that we can help you get started with?) Get in touch with us today!