3 Ways to Build a Better Employee, One Support Call at a Time
Efficiency. It’s the unofficial buzzword of 2009. It may summon fear in corporate workers; after all, it’s often heard as justification for layoffs. But that unassuming little noun can also motivate your employees, and maybe even give them renewed interest in your company. It depends on how you package it.
In a recent post on TechRepublic, Calvin Sun offers 10 tips on the subject. Here are three that warrant elaboration:
Less Imaginary Widgets, More Genuine Examples
If one of your employees is fumbling with the Access sample database “Northwind,” it’s no wonder. How invested is he, really, in Raclette Courdevault and Geitost*? Give him something that is familiar, like an actual database from your company, with products or figures that have relevance.
If you took a three-day course on jet propeller engine repair, would you submit your resume for a job as an American Airlines mechanic?
“If you can relate to the material you’re studying to something in your own life, your retention will be greater,” writes TechRepublic’s Sun.
Long Distance vs. Sprinting
Sun explains how people are more likely to retain information that is learned in small chunks over time than what is studied during marathon cramming sessions. We know this. We’ve been told at least once in our lives not to cram.
Yet, in the case of Office 2007 migrations for example, employees are given mini courses or just PDF cheat sheets to learn a software suite that is radically different from previous versions. Do you think your employees are going to remember that the chart options have changed in Excel 2007 if they learned it upfront but create only one chart a month?
Use It or Lose It
If you took a three-day course on jet propeller engine repair, would you submit your resume for a job as an American Airlines mechanic? Apply that same logic to standard corporate training courses. While you have given your employees initial training on applications, you cannot expect them to walk out of the classroom as experts.
Still, some companies leave employees to fend for themselves after initial training. On a recent call to PC Helps, the customer wanted to know how to search two Excel worksheets for duplicates. Worksheet One contained 30,000 rows of data; Worksheet Two had 16,000. A consultant showed her how to use a nested formula. The employee was elated, and confessed that she was about to manually vet the data – all 45,000 rows. That’s hardly efficient. It’s an avoidable tragedy. (Jen Darr)
How do you promote efficiency in your office? Tell us in comments or send me an e-mail.
*Raclette Courdevault and Geitost are two products sold by the fictitious Northwind company. The former is cheese that is melted and served over boiled potatoes with lots of ground black pepper – big in Switzerland; the latter is Norwegian dessert cheese that must be sliced paper-thin. But I had to look that up.
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Regarding Long Distance vs Sprinting and Use It or Lose It, a critical component that’s consistent across both is the delivery of information. Many organizations still subscribe to the tenet of face-to-face delivery supported by printed materials. Although appropriate in some instances, these interactions are expensive and the supportive materials are often sub par with respect to providing a platform of reference.
Enabling employees, moreover those persons responsible for supporting, selling or having conversations about a product or product suite, is about providing information that’s timely, flexible, available online/on-demand and easily updated.