Use Your Documentation During Live Training

Today’s post is from Jonathan DeVore, Director of Marketing at ScreenSteps. Jonathan is keen to help organizations spend more time having meaningful interactions with others, and less time explaining onscreen processes.

It’s no secret that most documentation you write will never be used by anybody in your organization. I speak to a lot Admin who are frustrated because they spend hours writing job aids and user guides, but their users would rather email them or knock on the door to get an answer.

Part of the problem might be how the documentation is written (something I already covered in a previous article) - but even if documentation is perfectly executed, users may still ignore it because humans are creatures of habit. We have all grown accustomed to asking our neighbor for help, especially when they are sitting next to us or are available down the hall. The knee-jerk reaction is to just ask somebody for help as soon as a problem is encountered.

If you want your organization to use your documentation, you will need to help them break old habits and develop some new ones. (You can check out a mini course I created to help solve this problem.)

First, help users feel familiar with documentation

Most users are not going to be familiar with using internal documentation. And what happens when people are unfamiliar with something? They avoid it.

In your organization, users can easily avoid your documentation because so many alternatives exist: email, a phone call, a knock on the door, or simply not doing a task. As long as your documentation is unfamiliar, users will continue to use the alternatives.

Live training is the perfect opportunity to help your users become familiar with your documentation. When you train a new-hire (or are doing a refresher training), show them where to find your documentation, and have them follow it when performing a task - documentation on the right, Salesforce on the left. If your documentation is set up like a recipe, this is pretty easy to do.

Second, develop new habits

As users execute operations during training, they will gain some confidence in your documentation’s ability to help them when they need guidance. But once won’t be enough - you need to help them break a habit that has been developed over years and years of asking for help.

So the next time a user asks for help, you will send them a link to your documentation. And when you perform another training/one-on-one session, you are again going to show them where to find the job aids. If you really want your documentation to stick, you need to help your users develop new habits.

Personal interaction is priceless

The intent is not to avoid personal interaction or create an environment where you never speak to people. In fact, this approach is geared toward having more meaningful interactions with users in your organization.

When you spend time with people in your organization, it should be to strengthen a relationship, talk about strategy, and enhance understanding of your mission - not to explain how to click through an onscreen process.

If you had unlimited time, user documentation wouldn’t be that valuable. But everyday you have fewer opportunities to actually spend time with your employees, volunteers, and contractors. Spending that time explaining simple workflows and onscreen processes is wasting a precious moment.

Check out Jonathan’s mini course for creating, and using, Salesforce documentation.