Introducing TerraTrue to your cross-functional partners requires thoughtful change management. It’s important to be mindful of your organization’s current processes around reviews, its culture and attitude towards proactive safety, and how this process you’re building in TerraTrue ties into your organization’s larger priorities.
If part of your onboarding has been configuring an integration such as Jira or Ironclad, you’ve likely already brought cross-functional partners into TerraTrue and introduced them to the tool. Even so, a roll-out still requires thoughtful coordination to ensure that business users don’t see TerraTrue or your review teams as a bottleneck. We’ve helped our customers successfully complete this exercise by following these six best practices:
- Find champions in other functions
- Look for the people who care about safety and build rapport with them. They can influence peers within their function, which can be incredibly helpful!
- Reach out and emphasize how you want to be a good partner. You want to help them acheive their business goals!
- Learn how their processes work. You don’t need to learn code, but it helps to know what tool your product team uses and how they typically plan their roadmap.
- Get the messaging right.
- Fines, regulatory scrutiny, and audits are scary. But others may not be so motivated by this fear - after all, it’s your job to worry about this. Not theirs!
- Instead, try to appeal to people on a human level. We are ALL consumers of hundreds of products, all of which collect, store, share, and use our data. Being a good steward of data is the right thing to do.
- Tie it into your larger business objectives. Is your company trying to go global? If so, you’d better be ready for GDPR. Similarly, upcoming M&As can be a strong impetus for cleaning up privacy and security practices internally. Investors are frequently looking at ESG as well.
- Partner with your internal comms or L&D teams.
- Most organizations will have a person, process, or team dedicated to communicating changes. Whether it’s a Learning & Development function or an internal comms team, they can help you understand what the best way to start rolling this out will be - whether that’s an email, a post in a Slack channel, a meeting you schedule with certain stakeholders, etc. Lean on them!
- Start with a small test group
- For some TerraTrue customers, rolling out the tool is an upgrade to an existing process. There’s a learning curve, and training that needs to happen, but it doesn’t significantly change the business user’s workflow.
- For others, TerraTrue may be the start of your new safety program. In these cases it may be best to start with a small group - even better if it’s a group with your champions! This can be a great way to get feedback
- Document your trainings, materials, and SOPs in an internal Wiki/Confluence.
- Record any live trainings and put them somewhere for people to review back to
- Have a plan for new employees - do you reach out, introduce yourself, and send them a link to your page?
- Be sure to also have discussed this with your cross-functional partners. They should be directing new team members to your landing page too
- Be available as a resource.
- Set up a Slack channel
- Host office hours
- Make yourself approachable (especially if remote)
