Have a spam day! Making communication tools fun.

Nov 8, 10 • In Practices

Picking a new team communication tool is one thing. Getting everyone to use it is another. Here’s a fun technique for easing adoption of a new tool.

So you’ve evaluated the options and picked a chat tool for your distributed team. Or a presence app. Or maybe you’ve decided to use video mail. Now you have another challenge ahead of you: getting everyone to use it.

Some people are natural early adopters. I’ll try any tool out if it’s new and interesting, and keep using it if I find it helpful. Others are slower to change. One way to get over that initial resistance to a new tool is to make a game of it.

One one of the teams I work with, the engineering leadership decided to roll out Yammer for status updates and virtual presence. In order to ease adoption of the new tool, I declared a “Spam Yammer day”. On that day, for a 12-hour period, everyone was encouraged to post to Yammer as often as they could. The person with the most updates at the end of the period got a prize from the CTO.

As you might imagine, the Yammer stream wasn’t very useful that day. But it did get everyone posting – including people who hadn’t posted much until then. Most importantly, at the end of the day, everyone on the team felt a lot more comfortable using Yammer.

Dispersed teams have to lean on tools a great deal in order to get their work done, and they have to stay nimble – switching to new tools when a better one comes out, or when the team identifies a shortcoming in their communication. If you are the one tasked with introducing a new tool, try making a game of it. You’ll likely find it makes the adoption go a lot more smoothly.

Have you ever had trouble getting a team to warm to a new tool? How did you finally get them to embrace it?

Title photo by Janet Galore

agile collaboration communication development dispersed teams distributed teams presence remote collaboration software spam tools virtual teams yammer

About the Author: Avdi Grimm

Husband, father, software cultivator, and amateur community builder, Avdi has been leading and participating in dispersed software development teams since 2007. He works from home in Southern Pennsylvania, and loves the fact that working remotely enables him to spend more time with his wife and four children.