“Employees are like people.”
Yes, I did hear someone say this once. And they are right! People tend to go their own direction based on their own instincts and conditioning. Yes, if someone works for you, you can make certain “demands”, but that only will take you so far.
In our implementations of AMG Alerts among our corporate customers, there is often a concern about how all the contact profiles will be collected. While some companies have significant contact information and can upload it into our system (perhaps as an initial “seeding” step), often, it’s more effective if the employee accesses our system directly to establish certain preferences.
So how do you establish buy-in and get maximum participation?
1) Set up the system correctly. Don’t make the people who DO jump into it have to go back and input information you forgot to collect
2) Communicate effectively. Beyond “we have this new notification system”, tell everyone what it is for, how often they can expect to get messages and when you will and WON’T use it. And if you can point to one or two example of when it would have come in handy, be sure to do that! Most of our AMG Alerts customers come to us because they have more than one great example of when it would have come in handy!
3) Establish deadlines for sign-up based on realistic goals. Publish the first one. Maybe it’s a week or so out. Then go back out and publish the next one, giving just a few days.
4) Be patient. If you don’t have 100% participation, all it takes is the first “situation” to occur where the system gets used. You’ll pick up the stragglers at that time.
We’ve never had an employer fail to be successful in implementing the system – even before the emergency occurs, because our customers have been creative thinkers. And of course once it’s used once, everyone else falls into place.