3 Digital Transformation Challenges Your Team May Encounter (And How to Fight Them)

Digital transformation challenges aren't fun. You've undoubtedly read plenty of blogs on the subject and may even consider yourself an expert. That being said, have you considered how your team might be struggling with the influx of new technology and business processes around it?

Well, fear not! Here's a helpful guide to add to your arsenal to fight off the top digital transformation obstacles faced by your team:

1. Creatures of Habit

It's hard to fault anyone for struggling to adapt. We are, after all, creatures of habit. Despite all the planning and resources thrown at digital transformation, users still fall back on their old ways of doing things. Cloud solutions for business gather dust, and automated business processes go largely unused as team members cling to their legacy systems with icy grips.

What's a manager to do? If you want to inspire change, you need to make it easy and make it worth it. Illustrate to your team exactly how they can benefit from new systems. Also, try to avoid boring training sessions — first impressions matter to your users. Think outside the box and come up with some fun ways to demonstrate how to use the new technology and how to integrate it into their daily habits.

Along those same lines, make sure they're equipped with everything they need to leverage new systems. It should be far more difficult for them — if not altogether impossible — to fall back on their old systems than to use newer enterprise cloud solutions.

2. Technology Overload

The office climate today is perhaps a bit more distraction-prone than in years past. It's hard to imagine losing focus as easily when the most advanced piece of technology in the room was a Swingline stapler. Add a heaping helping of mobile technology, cloud-based communication solutions, and high-speed internet access, and what do you get? A limitless supply of constant distractions.

It's no wonder, then, why this poses one of the greatest digital transformation challenges. In fact, Business.com recently described the tempation of technology as the No. 1 productivity killer. As such, you need a strong plan to protect your users from technology overload. A great way to accomplish this is to limit user exposure to new technologies by centralizing digital transformations. Here are a few tips:

• Don't give users access to more technology than they need.
• Avoid feature overlap when deploying new technologies.
• Combine communication tools such as chat, video conference, and phone into a single platform.

3. Getting Up to Speed

According to Gartner, almost 80 percent of people don't think their current skills will be nearly as useful to their organizations in 10 years. Digital transformation is a key contributor to this sentiment. This can be a disconcerting outlook for people who put so much heart and soul into their work.

When you think about it, concepts like digital transformation are only made possible by technology's impossibly fast rate of change. It's this constant change that brings about the aforementioned obsolescence. The remedy, then, has to be constant education.

As painful as that sounds, there's simply no magical substitute. Even so, education doesn't have to be tedious or expensive. Initiating furthering education programs can help keep users from the discouragement of watching their skills and knowledge slide into uselessness. These programs allow users to leverage small amounts of company time each week to educate themselves on new areas of interest — related to their own jobs or current projects, of course. The result is a team with constantly growing skill sets to match the ever-evolving technology around them.

So, now that you've learned more about potential challenges and how to solve them, it's time to begin your digital transformation.

Contact Vonage Business to learn more about how cloud-based communications can aid your company.