How do you encourage deletion of something without putting the user off?

Question

Scenario: A manager has access to her team members data on an internal system. She also has access to certain team members that have since moved to another role or under another manager.

We want the managers to keep their employee roster up to date so it would be helpful if these managers "deleted" people they no longer are responsible for.

Through testing I received feedback that this remove feature was ignored because they don't want to mess up the database. The problem is the database is a mess because we have duplicates and crossed wires, so we need the managers to use this remove feature. So my question is how can I improve this component to actively encourage data cleansing?

Answer 1

Let the system create notifications for managers to consider removing users.

Doing so will make user removal feel like a natural part of the application.

These notifications can prompt for attention once one or a handful of maintenance items are identified. The detection can be triggered by last login date, last work item completed by this user, or any other measure of being active on a team.

By allowing the system to prompt this, users can rest assured that this is a natural process that is not a dangerous or destructive thing. You should still allow the manager to remove users whenever they want, but providing this mechanism will help normalize this process and assuage your users' hesitations.

For example:

It may be beneficial for users to have control over these notifications, so they could fine tune or opt in/out of a particular type of notification. For example, it could be useful to have control over this notification threshold (e.g. alert when users have not logged in for at least x months).