Why You Shouldn’t Give People Too Much Credit

Changing expectations to help achieve better results

Sometimes I feel like I give people too much credit. I don’t mean credit as in praise or accolades. I mean I too often think that people, in general, will understand something that it turns out they don’t. It isn’t that my expectations are low. They aren’t. It isn’t that I am gullible. I’m mostly a skeptic. But there are some things where I just believe that people are a bit more capable than they turn out to be.

I’m in the process of rolling out a redesigned corporate intranet and collaboration platform. The project team throughout the entire process has of course taken strides to ensure the redesigned traditional intranet site and the new enterprise social network are as user-friendly and intuitive as they can be. With anything, there are limitations of course. But, if we assume that all of our users are going to make the same inferences as we have, that they will pick up on the same nuances that we take for granted, and that they will intuitively understand new features and capabilities — we are going to be in for a rude awakening once we launch.

So, we can’t do that.

We can’t give our users hardly any credit at all. We have to assume that they will absolutely not get it. We have to assume that our focus groups and card sorts were anomalies. We have to assume that common features we are mimicking from around the web and in web-based applications aren’t commonplace at all. We have to assume our users, haven’t used those sites.

So, we have to build our site even better.

We have to make it more intuitive. We have to provide visual cues. We have to have explainers. We have to write and publish job aids, instructions, and record short videos. We have to push communications weeks in advance telling them that something is going to change. Really. Things are going to change and you need to do a couple of things to prepare for it. But, they probably won’t read those, and they probably won’t do those things to prepare — so we are going to have to help them on launch day and remind them. The help desk is going to get a lot of calls. We are going to get a lot of calls. Everyone is going to get a lot of calls.

And, then everyone will have used the site for a few days. They will learn the new navigation. They will learn the new features and how the site is easier to use. They will learn a trick or two in that collaboration platform. They’ll see how it isn’t too different from social media sites they use to keep up with their friends and family. They’ll stop mumbling about “change,” and they will adopt the new stuff. They’ll eventually adapt the way they do things and it will make their jobs easier to do. It will make them more productive.

And then guess what?

I’m going to change it on them again.

Change is inevitable. Change is progress. Progress leads to innovation, and innovation leads to improvement.

Too often companies get in this rut where they give their employees tools to do their jobs, and then they leave them to it. They pat themselves on the back and hope for the best. The employees go to work with the tools they have. Changing the tools is hard; employees often can’t do it on their own. When they do, they are seen as “going rogue” or creating “shadow IT” (both of which sound fun and, by their names alone, enticing). Maybe they complain. Maybe they give a low score on the bi-annual company survey to the statement “I have the tools I need to do my job,” but nobody really knows what that means.

We have to get out of this rut. We have to continually look to advance the software and systems that workers use to do their work. We have to give employees tools to truly do their jobs efficiently and effectively — not on the basis of what was acceptable in the past, but on the basis of what is acceptable now in our fast-paced, ever fluid and evolving ecosystem of socially enabled, mobile, and “smart” systems.

Future generations not only expect this, I’m not sure if they know how to do things any other way.

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