17. Quick Wins
Consistency Strategy / Follow-up
Skill Gap Assessment / Pre-training
Strategic Burst Training
Communication
18. Upcoming Chicago Community Events
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Editor's Notes
Hello my name is Rebe de la Paz and I am a senior Salesforce administrator from Becker Professional Education. Today I would like to talk to you about some End User Training Quick Wins.
Normally there is a Safe Harbor Statement or Forward Looking Statement, but I do not work for Salesforce.
While I do work for Becker, the following opinions and ideas are my own.
I am not the average person, so I tend to do things totally outside of the box.
Here are my quick wins right now, boom I have finished thank you and end scene.
No seriously I want to read these off to you and you will get why at the end.
Skill gap assessment / pre-training, strategic burst training, communication and consistency strategy / follow-up.
Sounds simple, right?
Wrong and here is why….
So to start I want to talk to you about my friend Bob. I believe everyone here knows Bob.
Bob is a representation of the everyday SF user.
He comes in at 9 or whatever time to start work, he leaves at 5 to end work. Bob also has a lunch and a break or coffee time etc.
Ladies and gentleman of 2016 Chicago Salesforce World Tour, I present to you Bob in the Box.
Sample scenario: Bob’s boss comes over to his desk…
…and tells him he has to learn how to fly a plane by the end of the week.
You have two options: you can learn how to fly from one of two instructors.
Instructor A: has read all about flying and will teach you everything they have learned
OR
Instructor B: has flown for years and is a top gun in the air.
By a show of hands who would chose instructor A to teach them to fly a plane and who would chose instructor B.
Now by no means am I discrediting those who work hard to teach what they themselves have read, but there are very important nuances that often go missing from teachers who have never ‘flown’ the plane themselves.
This is but one piece of the failing end user training problem.
The other is Bob in the box.
With Bob in the box there is no way or time for his company to effectively communicate with him.
Bob’s company has sent him emails, training guides, sent him training video links, used customized software, sent him to classes and signed him up for webinars.
The problem is Bob is still in his box. Anything that takes place outside of starting work, ending work, eating lunch and breaks is no something Bob feels the need to invest in.
In addition to Bob’s Box, it has been scientifically proven that 70% of what is learned in one hour will be forgotten, BUT there are also several solutions available to combat the forgetting curve.
Skill gap assessment and pre-training is when you do something really simple, you survey the skills of your users before any training commences.
Really simple right?
This is not rocket science, but it is cognitive delivery science which sort of makes you a scientist if you are the type that wants to feel special.
If you have a small group of users or you want to batch your users into groups to make it easer to train everyone, this is a great method for finding out who needs what is known as pre-training or extra help and who doesn’t.
Again I am putting the cart before the horse here, but really because I want to talk about burst training.
Many companies implement this as a one day eight hour training fest, or three-day marathon race to learn it all and again science has proven that it does not work.
BUT I have a solution to this, it is not the method but the delivery that has failed.
Burst training can come in many forms, so if you develop a pre-burst training environment sort of like a teaser this will work to benefit employees and help in identifying your advanced skill users who can help you in training others down the road. This also provides curiosity, can improve culture, aide in memory retention and best of all it will help take down some of Bob’s walls.
You remember Bob in the box, well now Bob might be willing to let go of some of those breaks to participate in a brief quiz that enters him into a drawing or give feedback on what he didn’t like in previous trainings before this one even starts.
This gives you as the potential trainer a quick win because now you have opened Bob’s box, which brings me to the next strategy.
Now that we broken down a wall in Bob’s box, we can now communicate. Remember…
Bob had all of these communications coming to him, but he was well guarded by the walls he has embedded in his mind. Start and end work, lunch and break.
No time for anything else.
Taking down this wall opens Bob up to actually receive communications, which is the most important.
Okay we are coming to the end, but I have one final quick win. One I have used throughout this presentation. An old trick really, but very effective.
I call it consistency strategy / follow-up.
I like to use 2 X 2 X 2 or 3 X 3 X 3 and it’s very simple. Repetition.
Either you follow-up on a topic 2 hours later, 2 days later and 2 weeks later or you follow-up on a topic 3 hours later, 3 days later and 3 weeks later.
Throughout this presentation I have repeatedly mentioned my quick wins to combat the 70% forgetting curve. A lot of training programs and companies do not follow this last step at all.
Hopefully, I have achieved in 20 minutes what most have failed within one hour.
So quick wins –
And that is all for my session. Thank you!
