Staff resistance to new systems led to employee dissatisfaction

A behavioral health company I was working for wanted to modernize their workflow and replace the hand-written paper notes with a robust electronic health record system. The idea was to decrease the amount of time it took to write the notes, decrease the delay in filing the notes, be able to write more accurate notes, and be able to pull accurate reporting. Despite the fact that this would be a benefit for the company and the employee, a large number of the staff were quite vocal about their displeasure in the new system and threatened to quit over it.

I put together a confidential survey to get the root cause of this issue. Since the new system would save them time and effort the fact that they were so adamantly opposed to it made little sense. In reviewing the responses it became evident that many of the staff did not possess the technical skills required to operate the new system. In tandem with the EHR system, HR was also rolling out new technical job requirements about typing speed and windows familiarity. Some of our staff did not posses these skills and stated that “they got into this industry to work with people, not machines”.

HR agreed to add a slow-rollout and grandfather clause for existing employees to give them time to learn the new skills. I also developed and taught a series of computer familiarity courses that ran for 1 hour in length and covered a variety of topics. Staff were able to sign up for the classes that they needed. This had the effect of allowing everyone who was struggling to get the targeted training that they required to develop their skillset and the staff became excited about the new platform. More than 60 of the company’s 930 staff members took training through this program.