Learning difficulties: how to make friends with technology?

When the first computers appeared, the accountants, accountants and statistics of all the offices of the USSR did not miss the moment to return to their usual accounts. Then they looked with disbelief at the first CITIZEN desktops on batteries and did not know that life had prepared a surprise for them in the form of 1C. The situation was interesting: some of the workers were enthusiastically learning a new program at the training centers, some of the same age were switching to another job, or continued to do everything the old-fashioned way. Now various technologies are introduced everywhere, but the situation does not change: each new program causes a wave of discontent and protest among non-technical staff. Companies waste money on training, expensive software stands idle, productivity stays in place or decreases. To spit and score is too expensive for a business. To force - to lose people and nerves. There is a way out - to train correctly. Time to bury the hatchet of physicists and lyricists and talk about how to live together.


A source

/ The article was written by an employee of RegionSoft under the heading "Free Microphone". The opinion of the employee and the official position of the company may or may not coincide. We are for freedom of discussion. The employee himself got out of the skin of a semi-humanist in the skin of a techie and knows what he is writing about. /

Where the problem's legs grow from

If you work in a company (or even manage it), you probably noticed what a bias among specialists: a programmer needs to be searched and selected, and all managerial positions - from sales manager to financial director - are occupied by economists, lawyers, executives, and education managers. If you are a little strained by this situation, relax - it’s like that everywhere. Just look at the report of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) on the education of mid-level specialists. The distortion is evident: even in 2010 (issue 2014-2015), when the fashion for technical education seems to have already been established and requests for specialties were formed, economists and managers grabbed their 17.6% against 6.33% adherents of computer science and computing. And if you add up all the humanities, the picture turns out to be even sadder.
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Against the background of this situation, we are witnessing a different process: not only software developers and software vendors, but also banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, etc. become technology companies. Even if the company is terribly far from the blockchain, the Ajail and the neural networks, it still caught the profitability points and seeks automation as a factor in speeding up processes and making more profit. We, as a vendor of a CRM system , have a great visibility: among the implementations there are companies of various sizes, profiles and various industries. And all of them are interested in the rapid and effective implementation of automation systems - we have not been looking for customers for a “cold” for a long time, they come themselves with high interest and motivation.

So, we have companies with a bunch of implemented and used technologies on the one hand, and a lot of humanities on the other. The laws of economics are such that jobs must be filled and they are filled - by the specialists that the market offers. That is, the first group meets the second and a boom occurs . And here an important division takes place: some of the employees with non-technical education quickly and willingly are friends with technology, and most of them turn into one big trouble with complete rejection even of switching from one email client to another. This is a real pressing issue for the company.

Why is this problem important at all?

One can make fun of the accounting and buzzing printer, hate marketers and bite salespeople, but it will not bring results. To begin to solve the problem, you need to realize it. So, what is the risk of a silent boycott of the implemented software or a new resource-saving technology?

• We say business, we mean money. So, first of all, this behavior of employees is a blow to the direct costs of a company that has invested in software or technology and expects a return in the form of increased efficiency and productivity, a certain level of corporate security, competitive advantages and improved working conditions. If you do not use the system, then, of course, you should not wait for the growth of efficiency and implementation payback - an expensive tool will stand idle or be used only by a group of workers.
  
• Employees who aggressively and actively do not perceive the new work tool will not just silently strike against him, but also sow similar moods within the team. Their own unwillingness to study and work will allow them to come up with a lot of convincing reasons against, for example, CRM (control, routine, additional actions, “well, I’ll learn, and the salary will be the same”).
  
• The overall level of dissatisfaction in the team can increase and spread to other areas of the company. This, in turn, can lead to passivity of employees, shifting tasks to colleagues and even to dismissal.
  

The situation is drawn gloomy, but everything is quite simple. It is important to know a little psychology and not to pour news about future technology on employees, like a bucket of cold water from the ninth floor.

Everything is thought up to us

There is a whole model of the life cycle of technology adoption, which is used to bring technology to market. Here's what she looks like:




Accordingly, the first and main secret of the introduction of new software and training in the treatment of employees of any specialty is simple: follow this cycle. Both among techies and among the humanities there may be supporters and opponents of innovation, which means you need to be proactive and not put them in front of a fact, but build a strategy.

Innovators are your main allies at all stages. They are happy to accept any technology, see the horizons of their application and are ready to carry their skills to the masses (well, almost). Enlist their support at the stage of choosing a new technology, create a working group, give each of them authority and responsibilities. Innovators will not only support you, but also be able to do important work, for example, in collecting requirements. As a rule, these are techies (engineers, programmers, admins, etc.) or people who are embroiled in technology.

Early followers - more numerous and no less reliable army. They can be useful in analyzing requirements and testing options for the necessary software. They will analyze the options with great enthusiasm and offer you the most suitable ones. An additional plus is that these guys work inside your business, which means they have an understanding of the full picture.

The early majority is part of the staff, which is separated from the previous two groups by the mental and technological gulf. Simply put, these are the guys who, without hassle, will quickly learn and sit down to work with those tools that are recommended by the management. As a rule, these are middle managers, non-technical managers and young, but already experienced specialists. Most often, this type of staff is quite picky and requires clarification of the details of the new technology. Use innovators and followers to clarify points of interest to colleagues.

The two remaining groups are a source of headaches when introducing everything: billing, CRM, analytics systems, new type printers, or even a new food supplier to the office. No, they are not brawlers and not lazy people, they are conservatives who, by virtue of experience, experience, show off, a spirit of protest or habit, are not ready to give up old slippers. They can be of any age, but most often they have a humanitarian education, in which lies the main reason for their relationship - specialists are afraid of innovation.

Later, the majority - the most loyal part of the conservatives, ready with a certain motivation to join the novelty and begin to work actively. These guys need a fairly simple approach: meetings, training, mailings, posts on the corporate portal. Best of all, if you analyze the profile of using the new system for logins and logs and can identify those who have already started active use, and who need additional explanations. And do not forget that a person may really want to understand, but hesitate to ask questions - the intensity and profile of the use of technology by such employees will help you to close the gaps unobtrusively.

Outsiders - we could not find a suitable word for this group. In the literature there are still "uvalyny", "lagging behind", "inert." But this is all wrong. Rather, they are reactionaries - employees who find it unprofitable / incomprehensible / inconvenient to work with the new technology and they will deny it to the last. Moreover, in this group there may be productive employees, and department heads, and young people, and suddenly not even the most hardworking sysadmin - because behavior does not depend on the accumulated competencies, but on the reluctance to accept new competencies. With these guys you need hard. The easiest way is to create a hopeless situation in which employees will be forced to turn to software (for example, set tasks there, write KPIs, ask for letters, chats, reports only in CRM / PM / BPM, etc.).

Protest against new technology - ancient time

History from practice. One not very big company created and sold corporate portals and simple CRM in them. The program was comfortable, uncomplicated, and even beautiful. But some employees (all as one - linguists and historians) refused to work in this system, and used chat rooms, Outlook, Skype, and Google users for clients. As a result, conflicts arose when salespeople could not explain any particularities to customers, because they themselves did not use the product. Then the head completely refused to any oral and written communication and received all messages, reports, reports through his product. For a month the problem was solved.

You can be indignant and say that all these strategies are a waste of time, you need to impose all decisions on policy and deal with the end. In a small company, this may work, in a large one - definitely not. A directory planting technology is great at stopping business processes, because employees do not occur gradually, but immediately - and without training, training and clarification, you will receive a bunch of incorrectly entered data, settings that have been knocked down, and in the presence of particularly crazy hands among employees, there are also problems with accessibility or shared storage (unknowingly, data will be deleted, some strange files and artifacts will be added, etc.). Of course, in most software there is protection from such actions, but time and nerves are definitely spent on this confusion.

And do not rush to put a comma in the resolution "execute cannot be pardoned" - listen to psychology and try out the advice that the RegionSoft team has experienced the hard way , not only in RegionSoft, but also at previous workplaces.

Psychology knows best

No matter what period of life is involved, the learning process is reduced to preparing for future independent activities: work, competitions, hobbies, etc. So, the acquired knowledge and skills should be enough for this free swimming. But we all learned and almost all experienced the same thing: as long as the teacher or trainer explains and shows, everything is clear, obviously, simple - but as soon as it comes to independent work, everything: panic and total intellectual paralysis. Especially if you need to repeat as part of the work, and not calmly at home. Here both fear, and shame in front of colleagues (fellow students), and incomplete understanding, and perfectionism. But in addition, many of us may have noticed that as soon as skills begin to pay wages, the process of learning and applying new knowledge in practice is noticeably accelerated. Greed? Fear of losing your job? Motivation? From the point of view of psychology, this is a completely ordinary phenomenon.

If you turn to classical psychology, you can find out that everything we do to learn (master the way to perform one or another action) is the same, but to work out in a business plan (get a certain result) psychologically completely different actions. The differences between the processes are:

• in the case of training, it is about understanding the scheme, in the case of work - about a specific result
  
• various measures of responsibility - in the case of work activities, the employee is responsible not only for himself, but also for the result of the team’s work, takes part in the creation of the product and in the formation of profit
  
• a different set of personality: formality or success (possibly in both cases).
  

And the first problem in the development of software by employees who are accustomed to work in the old manner is that they perceive the technology as another fragment of the educational process in their lives: to pay duty, sit, poking at a smartphone, return to the workplace, close CRM, open favorite "exelku" and continue to drive there notes, in which the devil breaks his leg, another dislocate. That is, the motivation is simple: to fulfill the duty to the employer. But there is no motivation to use the new opportunity for your own benefit, to start working more efficiently, freeing up time for other tasks, and earning more.

And in this particular case, the manager should not impose motivation problems on the employee himself. It is the leadership and service of HR that must find adequate motives and help rethink the new reality. It just sounds scary. And the example is simple.

Suppose a customer service manager spends 20 minutes a day on a client, 10 clients can be processed a day, that is, about 200 minutes are spent only on clients. A CRM system can reduce the time per person to 12 minutes - that is, 120 minutes are spent. Almost half an hour has been won in which the employee will additionally serve, for example, 4 clients. And the company will bring +60 000 rubles per month. If you do not motivate an employee financially, he will not be interested in mastering time-saving technology - “why should I work more for the same money.” If you offer him 5% of the over-pool of clients or promise a salary increase with an increase in the flow of clients, the motivation will be completely different. (Just remember to keep the promises!)

With the right motivation, an employee has a need for training, because it acquires significance, and therefore a reference point for training purposes.

The process of learning anything is nonlinear, but generally fits into a simple chain: perception of the material → comprehension of the material → consolidation of the material → mastering the skills and practical application of knowledge.

And now is the time to remember that we are talking about a special case of training: when a person is forced to learn something that is not his professional profile and is foreign to his mentality. The problem of apperception arises - the impact of all the accumulated human experience on the perception of objects and phenomena, that is, the preconditions that were created earlier affect the understanding and memorization of educational materials. And there is no place for snobbery. If you start telling sales and marketing managers that the new release has support for routing in IP telephony and LDAP, and then demonstrate how reports are generated in Fast Report, then most likely no one will learn anything. Just as you do not catch on the fly a chart of accounts, nuances of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation or principles of managing retargeting in the Display Network (I’m not talking about learning hundreds of formulas for calculating profit, profitability and all taxes of the Russian Federation).

So how to train them?

So, you have decided to introduce a new software or technology and now you are standing in front of your team and you need to tell everyone that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. And in these moments, I want to become Steve Jobs, who is amazingly promoting new technologies. And not only promoted, but did the most desirable in the world. Although ... why not "sell" technology to employees?

Of course, if a new machine or an important engineering component is being introduced in production, you can arrange a whole event with a presentation and pleasant surprises, in passing tell about the importance and importance of this thing, and then start learning. But these are other reasons ... But when you implemented a CRM system (ERP, BPM, it doesn’t matter), such actions will cause at least a wary negative. But you can hold a meeting and talk about the benefits for each specific unit, and even better hold separate relatively informal conversations in each department or department. And it should not be persuasion or ardent speech, it should be a dialogue about difficulties, fears and solutions.

So, objectively and point by point - what to do, so that non-technical specialists can adopt the technology and start using it effectively?

The first thing to overcome is the fear of ignorance . Employees should be informed so that all explanations are from managers, not rumored. The more rumors and speculation, the greater the fear of employees and feelings of non-involvement in the affairs of the company. Therefore, at all stages of conducting information: write on the portal, speak orally at informal meetings, do the mailing. So you will overcome the primary negative ignorance and expectations.

Arrange training based on vendors, innovators, and early followers. And at first, it should be serial and systematic, so that the learned should not be forgotten, because according to research by an international training agency, 50% of the learning content is forgotten within five weeks, and 84% - within 90 days.

Communicate and let time for questions , even the most primitive. Let it be chatting sets at lunchtime or evening discussion for a hot pizza at the end of the week, the main thing is for colleagues to share their experiences and live hacking work with the new application.

Real story. In one company decided to introduce advertising in AdWords (search the Google network). There was not a single employee who knew the interface and principles of work in this system at a good level. The company appealed to a staff member of a friendly organization with a request to conduct training. After 2 months it became obvious that something was missing, the trainer was again called. Contrary to expectations, the trainer did not begin to walk through the material again - she gathered everyone in the meeting room and asked everyone to tell about the findings and observations. Such information exchange was implemented on an ongoing basis - and the synergistic effect led to an increase in conversion and pumping skills of each. By the way, a little after these events, the first AdWords online school started, and the ready knowledge of the subtleties and secrets of skill from Google went to 5+. So do not hesitate to check with the vendor if he has any of the materials for training. And if not, create and accumulate yourself!

Set measurable learning goals and evaluate outcomes , preferably by comparison. Suppose that for some time the intensity of work in the system goes into a positive KPI (you work well or train - the bonus, there are problems - it does not affect the salary).


This PC reports that I need to upgrade my brain to be compatible with this new software.

Set key milestones and deadlines for learning and mastering new technology.

Allow employees to consult with internal experts alone to be able to ask the most stupid questions that are embarrassing to ask in public education.

If an employee is very hard (due to difficulties of understanding or fear of not knowing), connect him to work in a team or with a specific employee so that he can visually see that there is nothing difficult in training, and the program only makes it easier. You can sharply give a responsible task and the opportunity to show yourself.

Again the story of life. The head of the department, a translator and an excellent marketer, was terribly afraid of Hangouts and always asked her deputy to set up sound, video and chat in front of video bridges (and they were permanent). She had a panic at the sight of this one green tag. Zam knew that she understood the algorithm perfectly, but for some reason she was afraid. And before the important meeting with the partners, the deputy was called to the director, and the boss, knowing that the time of the seminar was about to come up, set everything up by herself. Perfect. By the time the deputy returned, she had already shared the screen and spoke enthusiastically into the microphone. The barrier was overcome in an extreme situation. And, as you can see, fear can cause not only SAP or CRM, but also an innocent simple application.

Set your goal to make employees consider the embedded technology as an advantage and could tell about it as a plus for their work ( “ We deal in the CRM system, no documents are lost, all calls are on time, and most importantly, how much time is freed”) . Show the personal and professional benefits of employees from using the program. You can implement it directly in the form of a label: department → problem → solution of a problem with a new tool. No department will refuse to accelerate their work and free their hands, especially in a small company.

If the technology has led to an increase in productivity and a company's profit, show it: motivate employees by adding wages or bonuses . Emphasize that this is a merit of automation, coupled with the experience of employees.

Do not force to master all the functionality at once. As elsewhere, the Pareto principle works here: 80% of the work covers 20% of the functionality. Start with this fifth part, and the employees interested in the result will begin to master the rest.

Accumulate and save information , make yesterday's students a novice mentor - let knowledge rotate in the company and each contributes to the knowledge and skills base. This will help employees to better understand the material, and newcomers to quickly adapt to the company.

Remember apperception: draw parallels with what the employee is good at . Is he an economist and knows production? Fine! Describe the operation of the system as a conveyor and emphasize that automated business processes are a division of labor. Is he a linguist? Even better. Explain that entering data into a program is similar to learning a language - the more data is entered into a computer, the easier it is to communicate with customers or partners.

Do not go deep into technical entities and do not load employees with unnecessary nuances, ask them not to do this and mentors. A person working with CRM as a user does not need to know the features of the client-server architecture, response codes, SQL language, console commands, and the development language syntax. Moreover, such details are not needed even for sales managers and marketers - they need to know what problems the customers are ready to solve the software, and not how it works from the inside.

Share knowledge within the company - let everyone contribute something from their education and their basic specialty: translate articles, edit the knowledge base, etc. This will not give a special load, but add pleasure to work, reduce the level of formality.

All the measures listed above, except for their main effect, have a very important side effect: according to this attitude, employees will understand that management is interested in introducing innovations, sees growth horizons, and therefore goes forward and employees are protected from cuts or business breakdown. Believe me, this feeling is extremely important in any company. A sort of corporate elbow feel.

Typical learning mistakes that make everyone

Working with people, you can not take into account everything and not make a mistake. Someone may not perceive the information because of laziness, and someone because of personal problems. Someone is ready to learn, and someone prefers to retire to a lower position. But there are basic mistakes that many make.

On the advice of coaches and consultants, many managers go into gamification (moreover, some CRM, for example, or project management systems contain this gamification within themselves). This approach, attractive and very attractive by the consultant, can have unpleasant consequences:

• employees will not take the training seriously
  
• employees will chase bonuses and solicit them from each other
  
• after the cessation of gamification, employees may turn away from the software and lose interest in it.
  

It has already been said about immersion in the details of the program, but the opposite happens - wanting to compensate for their education, the employee begins to learn the programming language, read Tannenbaum and Habr only in order to speak at the meetings not a form, but data fields , not “preserved”, but “synchronized with the central repository”. This is fraught with waste of working time, because it will not give any advantages when using software in the main activity.

Finding a budget for training and implementing LMS knowledge management systems. The budget for training within the company needs a minimum - just rewards for mentors and successful employees. LMS is all the more unnecessary - in almost every software there is a knowledge base where you can enter all the necessary information. In extreme cases, you can create a Wiki or a section on the corporate portal.

After a new technology is launched and even outsiders have learned and pulled themselves up as users, it is important to ensure a few more points:

• periodic knowledge sharing
  
• coaching in difficult situations
  
• maintaining knowledge base
  
• saving software documentation as a user’s handbook.
  

We all received and receive a different education: at the call of the soul or at the insistence of the parents. And we all dream of becoming one, and becoming different. Alas, not all translators can work in the diplomatic corps, and all economists can be ministers or, at worst, wolves from the Moscow Exchange. But we all work in our companies on one thing and we all know how to learn. So, it does not matter whether you are a lyricist or a physicist, just help each other and do not stop in learning. Then the result will please both morally and financially.

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