Onboarding Faster With WalkMe
Onboarding – enabling your users to effectively use a system – is not only essential, but also can be the largest factor in achieving the return you are after from the system. Ineffective onboarding can lead not only to lower efficiency and productivity, but also a substandard customer experience while the team adapts to delivering within the new environment.
But effective traditional onboarding is generally time consuming. And expensive.
Don’t Drink from the Firehose
WalkMe embeds technology faster than traditional approaches by fulfilling the role of subject matter expert, acting as a personal on demand coach for users within the software platform. While classroom style training sessions typically aid in familiarisation of the platform, retention of how to use the system as desired is typically poor once employees are back at their desks or out in the field. In fact, as much as 70% is forgotten in the first 24 hours.
The problem with too many ICT platform rollouts is that a Big Bang approach is taken to deliver training. Rather than delivering content in manageable bite sized chunks that people can absorb, retain and embed before moving onto the next thing, too many programs deliver “dump-truck” style training and push everything out on end users in one go.
WalkMe takes a different approach and helps you adopt a Lean approach to enablement, reducing waste from training that people forget five minutes after delivery, offering a customized solution specific to the user. Guidance is given at the point of need, offering targeted, self-paced enablement for each individual user. By doing it this way, processes are more effectively ingrained as information is delivered when it’s needed, and in context.
The Onboarding Nightmare
Think about your own onboarding experience in a new organisation. On day one, you are sat down in the company’s boardroom and for the next three hours, the in-house HR type role walks you through 52 Powerpoint slides that cover off a high level overview of everything you could ever want to know about how things are done in the organisation. As you walk out, you are handed a ream of documentation for you to read on your own time that covers off all the company’s policies and what to do should you forget anything that was just explained to you.
How much of that onslaught of information do you typically retain? Statistically speaking, not much. You may retain the general gist and be familiar with the concepts, but geez, how hard is it to remember which form in which system you need to use when you go to book in your first week of leave two weeks later!?
A More Rational Approach to Onboarding
For those of us who aren’t Rainman, this is where WalkMe comes into its own. Two weeks later, I can click on a link in my WalkMe enabled email system and be directed to the right place and follow the right process. In the alternative scenario, I waste 10 minutes trying to find directions in my ream of hand outs, I give up and then I bother my teammates and ask them what to do. As they hardly ever go through the process themselves, we all waste another 15 minutes trying to remember what needs to happen next. And you know what, at the end of all of this, I still haven’t submitted my leave form, I’m irritated, and not in the zone for achieving a whole lot of anything for the organisation.
Scale this to the size of a 400-person organisation with a new IT platform roll out with over 1200 new processes to train people in. That’s a lot of downtime born out of employee frustration and confusion! Not only that, with a whole organisation roll out, there’s the inevitable anxiety from some employees who fear they won’t be properly supported in the new world.
While the project team will always do their best to bring everyone on the journey and ensure that everyone receives the training that they need, with every roll-out there is always potential for misunderstanding, resistance and anxiety to tempt with years of really great work. Having WalkMe on your enablement team will aid your change management process by helping quell some of that anxiety, offering peace of mind to teams that they will be supported if and when they need it, at the time of need.
Continuously Delivering Value
In the early days shortly after go-live, WalkMe can help prevent costly mistakes being made, and in cases where process compliance is necessary, can be used to prevent people for adopting their own approach to using the system. WalkMe functionality will not only assist in guiding people with what to do as they need it, but it can also be programmed to lock down certain processes so that employees are guided to complete tasks in a prescribed manner.
Why would you consider using this? Perhaps for simple things like enforcing file naming conventions or accurate form completion. Or, perhaps you might have come processes where an incorrectly completed workflow will have significant consequences in other areas of the business. In systems where misuse of a process has a flow on affect to other processes, having to go back and fix user errors can take months if you need to get the vendor involved, and if the mistake impacts a customer, can have a negative effect on your brand. Maximise your return on investment for both the platform and your training efforts by using WalkMe as a support tool to get your team enabled and using the platform quickly and correctly after go-live, and support onboarding and succession planning activities as part of business as usual.
