VETERAN EMPLOYEE · PRODUCT AND PROCESS
Why your longest-serving employee hates your software — and why you should listen
It happens in almost every business that brings in a new system. The younger staff are comfortable within two days, the owner is pleased with the reports, and one person — the one who has been there fifteen years and knows every customer by name — carries on writing in the notebook and types it into the system later. It is tempting to put that down to trouble with change. Pause before you do, because in most cases they are not objecting to the computer. They are objecting to something quite specific, and they are usually right.
It is not fear of technology
The standard explanation is age: they are from another generation. Yet the same person books a doctor's appointment on their phone, pays through a banking app, follows a sat-nav and sends photos to the family group chat. A screen does not frighten them. The difference is that each of those tools saved them something on the very first day — whereas your software, from where they sit, has only added work.
The classic research on how people take up information systems found exactly this. Two things predict whether people will use a system: how useful they believe it is for their own work, and how easy they believe it is to use — and usefulness carries more weight than ease. In other words, an employee's first question is not will I manage to learn this but what do I get out of it. And your most experienced employee has the most clear-eyed answer in the building.
What they lose on the day the system goes live
Speed. Someone who has carried out a task thousands of times does it almost without thinking. The learning curve drops steeply at first and then flattens into a plateau of steady efficiency, and your veteran has been on that plateau for years. A new system sends them back to the start of the curve. The colleague who joined last month is sent nowhere, because they were at the start anyway. That is why the best person pays the highest price.
Standing. Until yesterday they were the one everybody asked. From today they are asking someone who arrived six months ago where to click. Nobody says it aloud, but everybody feels it.
The exceptions. The customer who always pays at the end of the month. The supplier whose deliveries arrive short. The order that is kept to one side until someone confirms by phone. The notebook had room for all of it — a note in the margin. The system has fields, and the exception fits none of them.
What they say, and what is worth hearing
Their complaints sound like grumbling. Nearly every one of them is a precise report of a fault.
| What they say | What it means | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| “It takes me longer” | The everyday task has got longer | Time the old way against the new one, with a watch |
| “There is nowhere to write that” | An exception with no home | Collect a week of exceptions and see where they ended up |
| “What are all these fields for?” | They type; somebody else gets the report | Go field by field: who actually uses this |
| “I'll enter it later” | The system is not there at the moment of work | Look at where they are standing when it happens — phone in one hand, customer in front of them |
| “It was clear in my notebook” | They do not trust what the screen shows | Find one case where the system was wrong, and fix that one first |
The signs the system has already lost them
The notebook is back on the desk. Data entry happens in batches, at the end of the day or the end of the week. Mandatory fields fill up with other, general and a full stop. And in the corridor people still say ask them rather than check the system.
The damage is larger than money spent on something unused. A system in which half the information is missing or typed in after the fact is worse than no system at all, because it produces reports that look reliable. The owner decides by them, while the business goes on running from the notebook. That is two records that disagree with each other — the problem we described in replacing Excel with a system, only more expensive.
What does not work
More training. They know where to click. They are not convinced it is worth clicking. Another session answers a question they never asked.
An order from above. From tomorrow, everything goes through the system produces minimal compliance: the fields get filled and the content does not. You have gained usage and lost the information.
Changing everything at once. Even in interface design the accepted rule is that users dislike change, and that it is usually better to evolve something familiar than to replace it overnight. If invoices, stock and the diary all look different on the same Monday morning, they have nothing familiar left to hold on to. Start with one task.
What does work
Sit them down first. Before you choose a system, not after. Ask them to walk you through an ordinary day, and write down every point at which they do something that is not by the book. Those are your real requirements.
Time the thing they do fifty times a day. With a watch. If the old way takes twenty seconds and the system takes a minute and a half, no amount of training will close that gap. On that one task the system has to be at least as fast as they are.
Give exceptions a home. One free-text note, visible and in the right place, is worth more than ten structured fields. And when the same exception keeps coming back, make it part of the system.
Give them something back. If all the system produces is a report for the owner, they are typing for somebody else. Give them something of their own: the customer's history on screen when the phone rings, a month-end count that does itself, an end to where is my order.
Keep them the expert. Let them decide what things are called on the screen, and let them be the one who shows everybody else. Someone whose own way of working shaped the system does not need persuading to use it.
And every mandatory field added just in case is a few more seconds on every one of their tasks — we wrote about how that adds up in more features, more mess. You can see the kind of work we mean on our client work page.
How we work with this. At appotto the specification starts beside the employee who knows the work best, not in the meeting room. We ask them to show us an ordinary day, including everything that is not done by the book, and we build around that. We measure success with one question: a month later, is the notebook still on the desk? The quote is fixed in advance, so the time spent listening never reaches you as a surprise.
Have a system your experienced staff quietly work around? Send us two lines on what is supposed to happen in it and what actually happens. We will tell you honestly whether the problem is the tool, the fit, or something else entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Why do staff not use a new system?
In most cases not because they cannot work out how, but because it does not pay for them. If the everyday task is slower than it was the old way, and all the benefit arrives as a report for the owner, the employee pays in typing and gets nothing back. A system people use is one that also saves something for the person entering the data, within the first week.
Is our longest-serving employee simply afraid of technology?
Usually not. The same person uses a smartphone, a banking app and WhatsApp without difficulty. The difference is that at work they are the expert, and a new system slows them down in exactly the thing they are fastest at. Their resistance is normally a plain calculation about time, not fear.
Should we make it compulsory to work only in the system?
Compulsion without fit produces minimal compliance: the fields are filled, but with ‘other’ and ‘general’, and the real information stays in the notebook. A rule like that only works once the everyday task is at least as fast in the system as it was the old way. Until then it hides the problem instead of solving it.
How long does it take to roll out software in a small business?
The everyday tasks should be doable within the first few days. The real test comes after about a month: if the notebook, the side spreadsheet or the after-the-fact typing are still there, that is no longer a settling-in period but a mismatch. That is the moment to stop and check what the system fails to cover.
What do we do if the system is already bought and the team works around it?
Do not start with more training. Spend one morning beside your most experienced employee and note where they go back to the old way, and why. Sometimes it is enough to drop some mandatory fields, add a notes field or change the order of a screen. And if the gap is structural, it is better to know early than to pay for another year of a system that produces inaccurate reports.
Sources
- Davis (1989) — Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology — the MIS Quarterly study which found that perceived usefulness predicts use of a system more strongly than ease of use.
- Nielsen Norman Group — The Power Law of Learning — the learning curve: why someone who has repeated a task many times performs it quickly, and what happens when the interface changes.
- Nielsen Norman Group — Fresh vs. Familiar — why users prefer what they know, and when gradual change beats a full replacement.
A system your team works around?
Tell us what is supposed to happen in the system and what actually happens — who types, who reads the report, and where the notebook is still alive. We will tell you whether a small adjustment will do or whether you need something else, and if you do, you get a clear direction and a quote fixed in advance. First consultation free.
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