We are all currently trying to adjust to our “new normal” which for many means working from home. This is no small shift for many, especially those who have employees that have never worked remote before. At Spekit, we can relate to those concerns. In fact we had several employees start only weeks before these changes were made, unable to complete standard training and onboarding.
How can you make such a quick adjustment and ensure that your company does not lose any more productivity and steam than necessary?
Identifying the challenges when it comes to working from home
It all comes down to communication, training and employee enablement. You may have to change the model of how your employees go about seeking important information and answers to FAQs (frequently asked questions). Additionally, you will need to make changes to the way you disseminate this information. How is it currently being communicated? Verbally? Through email? Slack? This will inevitably become more challenging with the WFH model.
It will also be critical to make sure employees do not feel isolated or like they are on an island. The adjustment will feel infinitely easier if they feel supported, heard and understand where to find the resources they need to be successful.
It’s a tall order for sure, and not one that can be done in a siloed approach. The good news is you are not alone. As mentioned above, we are adjusting to this “new normal” ourselves here at Spekit. An important cornerstone in our strategy to approaching this challenge is practicing what we preach. We are using Spekit internally to make sure our employees have all the resources they need at their disposal to be successful in each of their specific job functions.
Here is a post from one of our incredible BDR’s who came onboard right before the switch to working from home:
So how exactly does Spekit make this happen? Let’s break it down into four distinct areas where Spekit makes working from home a breeze.
1. Centralized documentation updated in real-time
We all know the struggle of looking for existing documentation in legacy systems. Where is that powerpoint slide? Which deck is it in? Does anyone know where the updated copy of this word doc was saved?? Who has the most recent version of the spreadsheet??? You get the picture. So much time is often wasted just trying to track down these pieces of documentation. It feels even more problematic if you are working from home/remote. If you are unable to find the piece of documentation you are looking for and no one responds to an SOS on your company’s internal messaging channels, what are you supposed to do? Allow Spekit to step in and take away the stress and endless searching.
With Spekit, all (yes ALL) of your documentation lives in one place that is easily and readily accessible to everyone in your organization. You are able to store everything, organized by subject, in the Wiki and data dictionary . This means no more headaches when it comes to finding answers and needed materials. Having your content broken down by topic means neatly storing what you need where you need it. You can even assign “experts” to each topic to make sure you are tasking the right people in your organization with keeping the content up to date and accurate. Sigh of relief.
Now that you have a centralized system for documentation, you can also ensure that updates and new information reach your whole team in real time. Again, this is more important than ever for remote workers to productively and efficiently do their jobs with all the resources available to them. When an update is made, you simply need to click the “notify team” button and boom! The team now knows there was an update made that they should check out. It’s that easy!
Now, your remote team(s) have easy access to centralized documentation being updated in real-time. No more worrying about how to access it, find it and communicate it.
But, what about creating the content? It can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to your Salesforce training. Not to worry, let’s look closer at our out of the box templates.
2. Hundreds of out of the box (free!) templates to get you started, like right now
As mentioned above, starting from scratch with content can feel overwhelming. This is especially true when it comes to your tools like Salesforce, for example. How can you make sure the info you are giving to your staff is accurate and easy to understand? And of course, you don’t want to leave anything out! If you are training and onboarding a new remote employee, you don’t always have the luxury of answering their questions face to face (over video chats). This is why it is extra critical to have complete and accurate information.
Spekit is here to help with hundreds of out of the box templates to cut your setup time drastically so you can get up and running ASAP.
“All of our go-live documentation for Service Cloud was defined and complete in about 10 total hours. That would have taken more than a week before Spekit.” – Bryan Miller, Director Business Operations for Bluewater Learning
Spekit offers templates and support materials for everything ranging from NPSP, FinancialForce, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Lightning and more. You’ll have training guides for dozens of tools in a matter of hours – not months!
3. In-app guidance for just-in-time learning where your employees need it most
Okay, now you are squared away with out of the box templates to get you up and running and centralized documentation, you now need to make sure employees have the support they need while working from home.
We know that everyone has a unique learning style and moves at a different pace when it comes to training. Some employees pick up on how to use tools like Salesforce quickly and for others it takes more time. And everyone needs new training when you inevitably make changes to your existing org as you evolve and scale your business. This is where Spekit’s in app guidance comes into play and helps you drive Salesforce adoption .
Let’s say you recently added a new field into your Salesforce. How do you let your team know this new information? An email, maybe? The information may stick with them when they first read it, but studies show we forget up to 75% of the information we learn in the first two days! This is really problematic for teaching your remote teams new information or about a new field in Salesforce.
We recently conducted a survey and asked users how they would go about installing a DVD player if they were attempting it for the first time. See the results below.
This is why we KNOW that in app learning and having knowledge embedded into the Salesforce platform is so crucial. Now when you add the new field, you can notify users but also feel reassured that when they get to this new field and forget what it means and why they need to fill it out, they simply have to hover over the Spekit icon next to it and have all the information they need.
You can take a deep breath knowing that your team will be happy and well equipped to take on whatever comes their way in Salesforce.
4. Extensions to save you time, no more aimless searching for answers (sorry Google!)
Lastly let’s look at the Spekit browser extensions and application extensions, and how they save you time and help your remote teams.
Let’s start with a quick example. Let’s say one of the members of your sales team is writing an email to a prospect before a demo call. All they need to do is pop open their Outlook extension, and quick search for the “pre demo questions” topic and boom! Everything they need is right there in front of them. They can quickly copy and paste the questions they need into the email and they are ready to send it. They did not have to take time to message or call their manager to clear the questions they were planning to ask, they had the pre approved important ones right at their fingertips.
Remember how in the last section we talked about the importance of embedded knowledge? Spekit made it easy and user friendly for users to get the information they needed when and where it was most important. Now imagine your users can take that same easy access of information anywhere they go online. With the Chrome extension, answers and support are only a click away. Employees no longer have to exit out of their browser to track down information, they can access it in real time wherever they are.
Spekit also gives users the ability to save their most frequent searches in the extension. If they are continually running across a process they don’t understand or a question they can’t remember the answer to, they are able to quickly visit their saved searches to pull up the information even faster.
With the Spekit browser and application extensions, your users are empowered to take on whatever challenges come their way. They have instant access to all of the documentation, templates, training and updates in your organization. Now your remote workers have everything they need to be successful.
Spekit makes working from home a breeze
With all of the challenges that come from adapting to the new working from home model that many businesses are facing, Spekit is here to help. We understand these hurdles because we are facing them as well. Using our own tool has made this transition smoother and easier for our team, even the employees who have never done it before.
Spekit makes centralizing documentation possible, provided out of the box template s to get you started, in app guidance and browser and application extensions to provide information when and where employees need it most.
We are here to help your team as we all adapt and adjust to this “new normal”. For more information about how Spekit can help your team ease into working from home or to see a demo, click here . To get started with Spekit for free click here .
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