CIOs offer tips for getting employees to change their most ingrained habits and adopt new unified communications tools. Disrupting the way employees interact is often risky. And deploying unified communications (UC) tools can be riskier than other enterprise software rollouts because it affects employees’ ingrained habits. “People move at their own pace around [this] technology,” observes Barry Libenson, CIO of Land O’Lakes. “It’s not like a new ERP system.” Installing Cisco’s UC suite during the next few months is critical to the $13 billion butter maker’s efforts to expand globally. One feature lets employees program their phones to forward calls to other locations, or to their iPhones, based on where their calendars say they will be. Another lets people launch a videoconference by clicking on a colleague’s name in the company directory. But UC tools create new expectations for how people will work together. Art Schoeller, an analyst at Forrester Research, says that makes it easy for UC deployments to fail because employees may not value the tools as highly as management does. “Users can ignore you and you lose the benefits,” he says. “You have to establish and [invest] in a change-management program.” Selling Change To sell the new capabilities, Libenson took a tip from Cisco and set up more than a dozen flat-screen monitors that display weekly messages informing the company’s 3,000 users about upcoming changes. He followed up the messages with paper mail and email, and offered demos for groups of 10. Then during each deployment (the tools were rolled out to Land O’Lakes’ two biggest facilities last month and are scheduled for use in its main dairy plant in February) Libenson designated IT staffers to wear orange vests and walk around answering questions or helping coworkers individually. Libenson says he’ll judge how well the rollout succeeds by how employees use the new tools. “It’s a failure if people still only use the [technology] traditionally.” Christian Anschuetz, CIO at Underwriters Laboratories (UL), says he made it clear to employees that they wouldn’t have a choice about using UC tools. But part of his implementation plan includes dedicating a team to communicating with workers and managing change. UL is using Microsoft Office 365 to unify phone, email and fax on desktop and mobile devices, and is shifting more than half of its voice network to voice over IP (VoIP). Before rolling out the technology, Anschuetz offered plenty of avenues for UL’s 7,000 employees to learn about it in their own way, including through blog posts, newsletters, webinars and videos. At CUNA Mutual, an insurance and financial services provider, CIO Rick Roy designated “change agents” in each business unit to educate their peers about a recent rollout of VoIP phones and Cisco telepresence tools to 4,000 users. “The technology part of this project is complicated but proven,” Roy says. The key to making it work is having the change agents explain to users how their business units will benefit. “The change agents [are] the voice of the audience they [are] representing.” Follow Editorial Assistant Lauren Brousell on Twitter: @lbrousell. Related content brandpost Sponsored by FPT Software Time for New Partnership Paradigms to Be Future-fit By Veronica Lew Dec 06, 2023 5 mins Vendors and Providers brandpost Sponsored by BMC Why CIOs should prioritize AIOps in 2024 AIOps empowers IT to manage services by incorporating AI/ML into operations. By Jeff Miller Dec 06, 2023 3 mins IT Leadership opinion Generative AI in enterprises: LLM orchestration holds the key to success In the dynamic landscape of AI, LLMs represent a pivotal breakthrough. Unlike traditional AI, which demands frequent data updates, LLMs possess the ability to learn and adapt in real-time. This mirrors human learning and positions LLMs as essential f By Shail Khiyara Dec 06, 2023 10 mins Generative AI Artificial Intelligence brandpost Sponsored by Freshworks How gen AI is joining the holiday shopping season One year after the launch of ChatGPT, the retail industry is embracing generative AI to deliver a variety of benefits By Elliot Markowitz Dec 06, 2023 4 mins Generative AI Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe