Getting Employee Buy-In for New Tech Tools

Adopting new platforms and processes

‍During the 2018 Egnyte Customer Summit in sunny San Francisco, participants went beyond secure file sharing and data protection and discovered content management’s role in digital transformation.

The most engaging panel from this year’s Summit centered around user adoption, the success of which depends on understanding employee pain points. Onboarding is easier when users see the value a new tool provides and our customer panel, How to Gain Org-Wide Adoption, addressed these challenges. Key speakers from four diverse organizations discussed tips for getting employees excited about using Egnyte.

‍Key customer insight

‍Advertising leader, MullenLowe moved terabytes of data into Egnyte to make it useful to employees. However, in an industry dominated by millennials and freelancers accustomed to using a variety of 3rd party apps for file sharing (shadow IT), it can take more to get users on-board with a single company-wide solution.

To combat the use of more familiar consumer apps by new hires and freelancers, MullenLowe approached user adoption creatively. The company created an internal advertising campaign for Egnyte, which drove product awareness. Once users understood the value, adoption was easy.

“This was bottom-up for us, so we didn’t really have to push that hard to get adoption. We kind of did a PR campaign and sent out collateral. It was really just an advertising campaign within an advertising agency to get people to use it.”

–– Mark Lewis, Global Infrastructure & Information Security Director, MullenLowe

What began as a solution specifically for the jobsite became a company-wide solution for construction giant, Balfour Beatty. “Having a single source of truth is hugely important for construction, because if someone is working off old plans, let alone old paper plans, it could be potentially disastrous,” noted Project Manager, Jeff Pistor.

The firm migrated all company data to Egnyte to ensure centralized content control/access. After encountering some initial pushback from personnel who weren’t tech savvy, Balfour Beatty demonstrated Egnyte’s simplicity in the field to help get users excited.

“Our setup is intuitive enough to where our users can just pick up an iPad and use it to access files anywhere, whether they’re in the field or in a trailer. Once they see how Egnyte puts access and convenience at their fingertips, they’re much quicker to adopt.”

–– Jeff Pistor, Project Manager, Balfour Beatty

Deploying Egnyte for hospitality group, Hakkasan was about giving the firm’s 1200 users a better way to collaborate without using shadow IT. Achieving user adoption was essential for the firm’s mobile workforce and once personnel saw how easy it was to gain file access remotely, companywide buy-in from Las Vegas to London was quick.

“We had the data replicated before the users even knew what Egnyte was and after we synced active directory permissions and all of our files, we targeted the users who do work from home and do travel. It caught on like fire once they knew they could work from home without having to be on the VPN.”

–– Mike Novak, CIO, Hakkasan

Because end users vary from industry to industry, it’s important that we understand exactly how they interact with technology and our product. Hearing directly from our customers helped shed light on pain points, workarounds, and solutions specific to their organizations. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Customers, check out the recording in our Community.