Five practices for organizing lifelong learning in a team
Continuous learning is not a luxury for IT companies, but a means of survival. To compete, teams have to quickly and regularly update their skills in accordance with market changes. Of course, you can encourage the development of each employee individually, and this gives its effect. However, sooner or later, growing companies are faced with the need to bring training processes to a unified form in order to make them more efficient, and consciously promote their importance among employees.
This is the case with Wrike . Over the past six months, the company has grown three times, a lot of new functionality has appeared in the product, and we had to sit down and thoroughly think over how we see the training processes in the team in order not to let them run. We have summarized our experience into five main practices, which we want to talk about.
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1. Onboarding newbies
This is the first and possibly the most important stage in lifelong learning. Fast arriving newcomers led us to develop and implement a single process of introductory course (onboarding). Here it is also important that we manage the work processes in the company through Wrike, so it was important to explain all the nuances of using the service before the person started to work.
Now active training takes about a week for regular employees and three months for the support team, which requires a thorough knowledge of the product. Ideally, such training includes a game form, different training formats (since different people prefer different forms of perception of information) and is dedicated not only to the product or work duties, but also to creating informal connections with the team.
Today, onboarding in Wrike is built from such elements.
2. Development Environment
Horizontal and vertical development within the company is beneficial to all. The company saves manpower and resources on finding new employees and gets a specialist familiar with the specifics of work, and employees are more interested in learning and staying at the same place of work. Ultimately, effective learning is possible only with good motivation and understanding how to apply the knowledge gained. Therefore, the role of team leaders and departments in Wrike is primarily considered candidates of those who already work in the company, which allows you to maintain already established connections within the team. We have an example of how a person who joined us five years ago as a support specialist created from scratch and today heads the analytics department at Wrike.
Of course, leadership requires a separate set of skills other than professional. We separately take care of training managers, speakers at conferences and those who conduct interviews - a system of internal trainings has been developed for them, which helps to develop appropriate soft skills.
3. Feedback
Feedback provides an opportunity to see your “blind spots” and take a fresh look at the quality of your work and role in the team. Wrike regularly uses three types of feedback:
4. General knowledge base
In any company, a large amount of up-to-date information is accumulated, which needs to be kept in open access for the team - from popular Q & As to the list of applications used and workflow descriptions. The question arises how to structure it better. In Wrike, each team creates its own knowledge base in a convenient form - it can be a folder with a list of tasks in the system, a set of presentations or short training videos. By the way, this significantly speeds up the introduction of new people into the course of business, so familiarity with such a base can also be part of the introductory course.
5. Exchange of experience between departments
The larger the company grows, the worse the employees have an idea of ​​what is happening outside their department. Meanwhile, if you build connections between departments, you can find new and original ways to interact and solve problems. In Wrike we use several formats.
Firstly, there are team lunches, in which each of the departments in turn talks about his work in the form of a game. Attract the maximum number of people by any means - from the auction to treat champagne.
Secondly, visiting sessions twice a year - in January and in July - help to sum up semi-annual work. Their program consists of speeches and managers, and employees, so you can get a complete picture of what different teams did during the year. Since the Wrike team is distributed between countries, one of the sessions traditionally began to be held in Mexico, and the other in Russia. It is possible that Dublin will soon be added here, because besides the exchange of successes, this is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with colleagues from other offices.
And finally, I want to tell you about hakaton - a successful experiment of this year. About 100 volunteers from different departments joined together in 20 teams and during the day worked to create a prototype for any idea that would help us significantly increase our customer base. As a rule, such a team was a cross-functional group of developers, designers and marketers, and the spirit of rivalry and time constraints significantly contributed to the convergence of employees and the development of new knowledge. We will not tell about the works of the winners, they will probably be reflected in the functionality of Wrike in the very near future.
This is the case with Wrike . Over the past six months, the company has grown three times, a lot of new functionality has appeared in the product, and we had to sit down and thoroughly think over how we see the training processes in the team in order not to let them run. We have summarized our experience into five main practices, which we want to talk about.
')
1. Onboarding newbies
This is the first and possibly the most important stage in lifelong learning. Fast arriving newcomers led us to develop and implement a single process of introductory course (onboarding). Here it is also important that we manage the work processes in the company through Wrike, so it was important to explain all the nuances of using the service before the person started to work.
Now active training takes about a week for regular employees and three months for the support team, which requires a thorough knowledge of the product. Ideally, such training includes a game form, different training formats (since different people prefer different forms of perception of information) and is dedicated not only to the product or work duties, but also to creating informal connections with the team.
Today, onboarding in Wrike is built from such elements.
- Passing the quest for new users within the product with viewing training videos and performing basic actions.
- View a webinar on how Wrike works and attend a training session, where we talk about how we use the service within the company.
- Global onboarding, where executives talk about their role in the company and how they see its development. In our case, the team distributed throughout the world is especially important for employees in different countries to have a single vision of the product and its goals.
- Breakfast for beginners, where old and new team members can meet and learn more about who does what. Usually we try to invite employees from different departments to form informal connections between them.
2. Development Environment
Horizontal and vertical development within the company is beneficial to all. The company saves manpower and resources on finding new employees and gets a specialist familiar with the specifics of work, and employees are more interested in learning and staying at the same place of work. Ultimately, effective learning is possible only with good motivation and understanding how to apply the knowledge gained. Therefore, the role of team leaders and departments in Wrike is primarily considered candidates of those who already work in the company, which allows you to maintain already established connections within the team. We have an example of how a person who joined us five years ago as a support specialist created from scratch and today heads the analytics department at Wrike.
Of course, leadership requires a separate set of skills other than professional. We separately take care of training managers, speakers at conferences and those who conduct interviews - a system of internal trainings has been developed for them, which helps to develop appropriate soft skills.
3. Feedback
Feedback provides an opportunity to see your “blind spots” and take a fresh look at the quality of your work and role in the team. Wrike regularly uses three types of feedback:
- Monthly 1: 1 meetings with the manager, during which the employee receives feedback on his work and can tell about his difficulties and wishes. Compared to team meetings, such meetings reinforce personal interaction.
- Peer review - assessment of the task (part of the code, marketing text, design element) by the colleague who gives feedback and offers opportunities for improvement. Since this is an exchange of views between equal employees, this feedback is not necessary for execution, and the final decision remains with the executor of the task. This approach allows you to collect several opinions and get rid of subjectivity, which can significantly influence, for example, in the preparation of marketing materials.
- Review 360 is a staff appraisal method that is produced by all of its work environment. Twice a year, we send out anonymous questionnaires with questions about the work of team leaders to their subordinates, supervisors, and colleagues. This method is aimed at assessing professional skills, identifying problem points in team interaction and telling about the positive experience of working with this person. Answers to open questions help to understand how a person acts, being in different roles in a team.
4. General knowledge base
In any company, a large amount of up-to-date information is accumulated, which needs to be kept in open access for the team - from popular Q & As to the list of applications used and workflow descriptions. The question arises how to structure it better. In Wrike, each team creates its own knowledge base in a convenient form - it can be a folder with a list of tasks in the system, a set of presentations or short training videos. By the way, this significantly speeds up the introduction of new people into the course of business, so familiarity with such a base can also be part of the introductory course.
5. Exchange of experience between departments
The larger the company grows, the worse the employees have an idea of ​​what is happening outside their department. Meanwhile, if you build connections between departments, you can find new and original ways to interact and solve problems. In Wrike we use several formats.
Firstly, there are team lunches, in which each of the departments in turn talks about his work in the form of a game. Attract the maximum number of people by any means - from the auction to treat champagne.
Secondly, visiting sessions twice a year - in January and in July - help to sum up semi-annual work. Their program consists of speeches and managers, and employees, so you can get a complete picture of what different teams did during the year. Since the Wrike team is distributed between countries, one of the sessions traditionally began to be held in Mexico, and the other in Russia. It is possible that Dublin will soon be added here, because besides the exchange of successes, this is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with colleagues from other offices.
And finally, I want to tell you about hakaton - a successful experiment of this year. About 100 volunteers from different departments joined together in 20 teams and during the day worked to create a prototype for any idea that would help us significantly increase our customer base. As a rule, such a team was a cross-functional group of developers, designers and marketers, and the spirit of rivalry and time constraints significantly contributed to the convergence of employees and the development of new knowledge. We will not tell about the works of the winners, they will probably be reflected in the functionality of Wrike in the very near future.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307042/
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