When first introducing new technologies and its applications to your real estate team, there may be some initial pushback. Learning and using new tools can be daunting, but team members will want to get on board because technology is developing at an exponential rate.
The real estate industry is implementing new technologies that are paving the way for an exciting new future. Emergent tools ranging from new transaction management software, CRMs, AI, and augmented/virtual reality are helping real estate professionals build relationships with clients and cater to consumer needs.
While these technologies are great long-term investments, they are drastically changing every aspect of the real estate industry. When introducing new technologies and processes, of course, it might cause some unintended turbulence within growing real estate teams. While most people within the industry already realize the benefits these new technologies can offer. Others are more skeptical in thinking their teams need to invest the time and money into these new tools.
As with any major shift, it’s natural for some to be reticent to change the standard process. Fortunately, there are three key actions that can help CRE leaders increase successful tech adoption in their organization, no matter how adverse your team may be to technology.
- Frame the Opportunity for Technology
Asking your team to overhaul the everyday aspects of how they work may trigger a little pushback. However, leaders have the chance to encourage and shift mindsets. Rather than magnifying the loss of your current process, leaders can get their teams excited about the potential of a quick and easy work process. For instance, new marketing automation software like Real Geeks, Zurple or Zillow Premier Agent can help teams find leads and deliver educational emails while cutting down the administrative time that manual labor would require. When leaders become invested in new tools, they can show employees how it streamlines work by documenting how much time it saves. Framing the opportunity for new technology in a positive way will help support teams to become more confident users and onboard them with clear directions. With the support and reasoning to justify the adoption of new tech, your team will be off to a positive start.
- Build a Strategic Learning Environment
CRE leaders must ensure that teams get the training they need. As a result, training should be accessible anywhere, when and how their teams want it. Instead of uninspired “how-to” manuals, interactive training sessions can help walk them through the process. Digital training manuals offer the ability to store, organize and manage information in the cloud, creating access to information in more engaging formats. With a mix of text, audio and video, workers can more clearly learn and understand complex systems step-by-step. Leaders can also implement gamification techniques, adding quizzes at the end of each training module or build in feedback loops, so they can ask questions in real-time. Companies like Interact CE help real estate companies implement gamification that allows agents to learn valuable lessons they can apply to their profession daily. With the same documented training process amongst all team members, it will guarantee a consistent experience and will help onboard and update the team quickly.
- Allow your Team to Take Ownership
While real estate leaders and managers have a large amount of responsibility to oversee trainings that work, not everything should fall solely on their shoulders. Many technologies come equipped with a customer success manager who can help onboard team members. However, as your team learns how to use the technology, leaders and managers can empower their employees to document their processes so that they can improve engagement with the training. Empowering workers can help build up their level of ownership and create internal advocates who will help other team members become excited as they learn what these new technologies have to offer.
Leaders can also encourage teams to become creative with videos, images, screencasts and audio, sharing them in the training process. By doing this, it can direct and motivate others in areas already learned by others. Plus, it helps ensure that not just one person is the gatekeeper to this technological knowledge or insight, which can often leave others in a vulnerable position if that sole person moves on to another company.
These new training solutions can help real estate businesses easily assign future training and onboard automatically. It will help leaders instantly see who has completed training and who needs more education. As teams tackle the implementation of new technology together, they will be more likely to embrace onboarding and help other colleagues get up to speed.
With all this technology, the real estate industry is starting to make data-driven decisions that are helping them become more agile and successful. In the future, the winners in real estate will increasingly rely on technology to preserve relationships with clients and deliver credible results.
