How will you help your organization respond to and support a productive Work from Home or Remote Working Environment?
COVID-19 changed the way work will be done in many, many organizations forever. At best, we must all plan for a hybrid working model, and leadership must determine how to best provide tools that improve productivity, keep everyone connected, reinforce consistent performance from any location, all the while protecting company information.
How will your organization respond to employees working remotely or virtually? Where can HR assist without being seen as the “policy police”? How will IT ensure secure access to the information every employee needs to successfully perform their job?
There is no right or wrong answer. Certainly, this provides an opportunity reinforce an organization’s commitment to digitally transform their operations and processes. There isn’t a single answer for any company. However, there are some approaches that we might as well ignore.
One of the worst is to assume everything will work the same when more of your employees WFH or WFA. Establishing systems that promote a supportive and a culture of engagement is going to be critical to effective change. Culture is about fostering relationships and engaging team members where they are in real time, so what kinds of systems help?
Information flow and answering questions are essential to assist people. If the goal is enabling employees to be as productive, perhaps more so from home or any virtual location rather than the office, think how those employees are going to get their questions answered. No longer will managers, supervisors, and subject matter experts be directly visible.
Pre-Existing Materials
Many, many questions are answered in training materials or documentation. A big problem is employees don’t know where to go in the binder on a shelf or the networked server folder with all the relevant documents. Knowledgeable people still make a difference!
Means and Motive
Messaging apps might work some of the time, but the employee still has to ask the right person, and that person needs to be immediately available. Messaging apps also lack the visual communication so important in human interactions. We are all more fearful our written communications might be misinterpreted.
Often, when an employee asks a question, the person answering can coach in real-time. The employees’ question is specific and needs an immediate answer (like during a sales call or customer service event). Other times the question is not for an urgent task. The conversation can drift into the purpose of the task or extend in other related directions. This is part of coaching.
Remote or virtual employees are likely to have more questions and have less access to coworkers and training materials. There will be far fewer interactions where knowledgeable leaders can coach individual employees too.
Consider this scenario…an employee needs an answer to a question. They can go to their manager’s office or ask an experienced team member. Assuming they are even available, they can obtain an answer though this still takes time away from productivity. Take this a step further and consider a remote employee’s situation. How will they find answers to questions in real time? The simple fact is they won’t without management’s commitment to provide a “real time” solution.
Easily Understand and Quickly Consume Information
A smart question and answer system should be something you consider. You will need something that digests or ingests the existing material. Be careful with this, though. Just taking training or reference materials and making them searchable does not add value and does not come close to coaching employees.
The smart question and answer system provides both direct answers to questions immediately and expands on those answers when appropriate. There is a structure to making the answers consumable. A one or two-page document is not going to help an employee who needs answer to a question in the next 15 seconds. Similarly, a two-sentence answer is not going to satisfy the need to understand how a task relates to other processes and workflow.
The immediate answers help the employee right at that moment. Links to additional materials or common follow up questions help further understanding. Those might be appropriate at that time or could be ignored due to urgency. Having multi-level responses makes the material more consumable to meet the needs of employees at the time of need.
If the employee chooses to follow the links to additional materials, they expand their understanding a lot more. This starts to get into the realm of micro-coaching!
Micro-Coaching: In the Moment Support & Development
For example, an employee doesn’t know what information to enter on a special form. Or, an employee needs to see the latest safety protocols. Or the employee needs immediate access to an operating policy.
A micro-coaching question and answer system would respond to the employees’ questions about how to fill out the form or provide the specific answer in real time. The answer could have links to additional information on each field, or the purpose behind the form, or what other forms needs to be completed.
Another use case is for HR and IT procedures, especially when WFA is changing so quickly. As companies bring on new services to aid employees, the usual informal conversation in the office to learn about new services may not be available. Having the new HR or IT service broken down in a smart question and answer system speeds employee adoption and keep them productive.
Process Flow and Improving Productivity
Micro-coaching systems help your employees with specific situations in line of business operations too. Micro-coaching is timely and focused. It makes your employees more effective. However, it is not a long-term substitute for real coaching or formal training, but it can guide larger coaching and training programs.
A really-smart question and answer system keeps track of employees’ questions, when they were asked, and other details of the interaction. Examining the Q&A history immediately identifies questions and answers that are frequently asked which might suggest more communication on this topic is required, other results may indicate a need to improve answers, and possibly other results expose topics that need to be developed and communicated across the workforce.
Informs Training & Development
There is great potential for the Q&A history beyond the immediate time of when the employee asks the question. The Q&A history provides the foundation for a deeper understanding of what additional training is needed, new areas of questions, and even the general attitude of employees who are working at remotely. An “easy to consume” Question & Answer system will boost employee morale.
One near term use of the Q&A history is alerting management if there are a lot of related questions in a short period of time. This can indicate an emergency need for training or intervention. If several employees have the same question, the odds are good that other employees may also have it and just have not asked.
Trends in questions need to be monitored. Machine learning systems that examine patterns in questions being asked highlight changes in the organization that may need medium-term attention. A great example of using the trends for micro-coaching is regular communications (e.g., learning messages, weekly newsletters, monthly policy & procedure notices, etc.) that goes over the most asked questions with slightly deeper responses than the Q&A system.
These same trends and patterns can guide different departments in designing training programs or additional reference materials too.
Working remotely or virtually (e.g., WFA) in some form or fashion is likely here to stay, as there are many potential benefits. Embracing this reality requires adopting technologies and solutions to more effectively engage and support employees in real time. Q&A systems not only help organization’s achieve this objective, they also reinforce digital transformation initiatives and employee engagement objectives.