Are you in a training death spiral?
You seem to be endlessly hiring new people, training them, and then having new people quit.
It's like trying to shovel your driveway during a blizzard. By the time you shovel to the end of a row, everything you just finished is covered in snow again.
You've seen the Find & Follow Training Framework and ScreenSteps knowledge base. You know those are the results you want. But, how are you ever going to get there?
A lot of solutions will promise you a quick fix. "Just put in our AI solution and all your problems will be solved!"
Unfortunately, those solutions are like buying an electric ab cruncher to try to lose 20 pounds. It sounds great, but it doesn't really work.
We are here to tell you the truth. Transitioning to Find & Follow Training is going to take a lot of work. This is no fad diet. It takes real work and a significant culture change at your organization.
As the co-founder of ScreenSteps, I understand how intimidating that can be. I also understand how essential and life-changing adopting new business frameworks like Find & Follow can be to an organization.
Once you get there, things are MUCH better. But there is a lot of content that has to be created at the beginning and that takes time and resources — things you probably don't have right now.
In this article, I am going to lay out three options for getting over that initial summit so that your whole team can rest assured that you can do this. You can launch ScreenSteps and start seeing performance improvements.
First, is the journey even worth it?
Yes! I just had a customer tell me, "Everything turned out exactly the way you said it would!" It was a lot of work getting their Find & Follow program launched but the experience has been transformational.
What type of changes have they seen?
- Confidence is off the charts
- Time to Proficiency is down
- Training is faster
Ultimately, it depends on what metrics you are wanting to improve on whether Find & Follow is worth your investment. Find & Follow helps improve performance metrics, decrease training time, and reduce the amount of time supervisors spend supporting subordinates.
Businesses that benefit from Find & Follow
It’s not just one customer or one type of business that Find & Follow supports. We’ve seen the same kinds of results for companies in these industries:
- Call centers
- Financial services
- Medical device manufacturers
- Medical scheduling
- Medical billing
- SaaS support teams
- Transportation
- Retail
- And more
The journey is certainly worth the effort.
3 options for creating digital guides to launch Find & Follow in your business
There is no bypassing the implementation and launch process for any project. There are three options for implementing Find & Follow at your company that require varying levels of work from your employees.
These options will help you prepare your digital guides and training materials, which will provide employees support on the job and during training.
Option 1: Do it on your own
This option is the heaviest lift for your company. It requires the greatest time commitment (and possibly the greatest financial impact).
If you have the internal resources available to you, then you can certainly pull this off on your own. We have many customers that have successfully made this transition with some basic guidance from a ScreenSteps coach.
Who do you need?
You need to have at least one of the following roles dedicated to creating your Find & Follow guides:
- A trainer
- A supervisor
- A subject-matter expert (tenured employee or someone else)
- An operations manager
This person(s) needs to be someone who knows the responsibilities and tasks employees need to perform very well. They should be skilled at writing clear directions and somewhat technically adept.
Often, companies take away this person’s other responsibilities so that they have enough time to create the knowledge base articles.
What will they need to do?
After you complete your Find & Follow Planning Workshop, this person will need to create the digital guides.
They will go through self-paced courses in ScreenSteps that will help them quickly learn how to create guides in your ScreenSteps knowledge base.
You’ll also need to prepare your Find & Follow training curriculum. This includes creating slide deck presentations and/or training videos.
Also, you’ll want to create a long list of practice scenarios. Luckily, you will have most of this list from your Find & Follow Planning Workshop. Your new hires will use the digital guides you create in the training program.
How long it will it take?
Typically, our customers who decide to launch Find & Follow on their own take 6-12 months to launch. If you can have 1-2 people dedicating the majority of their time to building content, then this process can go quicker.
We recommend doing an 80% Launch to help you launch ScreenSteps quicker and see results faster.
With an 80% Launch, we have found that departments generally need to create 30-50 articles to initially launch. Of course, the exact number of articles you’ll want to prepare before launch depends on the size of your organization and the number of procedures you need to document.
You can accelerate this timeline by putting more people on the project. You can enlist subject matter experts to write different digital guides.
What does it cost?
There is no additional cost for implementation services when you handle the implementation on your own.
Option 2: Do it with our coaching services
Option 2 is similar to option 1 in that your team will handle preparing and launching the materials and program. The difference is you will have a designated coach to help your team along the way.
It is a good option for those that have the staff to handle the implementation and launch. However, they may need a little training on best practices to execute the launch.
The coaching services will provide your team with the tools they need to launch Find & Follow with your ScreenSteps knowledge base.
Who do you need?
When you choose to launch with our coaching services, you need the same people as you do for doing it on your own.
Once again, you’ll need at least one person dedicated to creating your Find & Follow content. This person(s) will work with a ScreenSteps expert who will coach them on how to write clear guides, organize your knowledge, create a training curriculum, and more.
We allow up to six people in a coaching session.
What will they need to do?
First, your team will need to meet for a Find & Follow Planning Workshop. Once you finish this 4-5 hour planning session, you can begin creating content.
The content you will build is the same as when you complete a Find & Follow launch on your own. You’ll need to create:
- Digital guides
- Find & Follow Training curriculum
- Training resources (i.e. slide decks, video courses, etc.)
- Practice scenarios
Depending on which coaching services you use, you will have coaching for creating some or all of these materials.
How long will it take?
When you launch your Find & Follow organization with coaching services, it is faster than when you do it on your own.
Your team is still creating the content. However, the difference is you have an hour each week to meet with a coach, who can help answer any questions you have. This helps you avoid mistakes. Plus, you receive feedback right away on how to optimize your guides.
It will take between 4-8 weeks to do an 80% Launch if you have 1–2 people dedicated to creating the digital guides.
Working with a coach can help accelerate your project because you have 1-on-1 opportunities to discuss challenges and learn time-saving strategies. Plus, you will review and work on digital guides together to ensure you are creating clear, concise, and efficient content.
What does it cost?
ScreenSteps provides two coaching options: the Guide Implementation Package and the Train Implementation Package.
The Guide Implementation Package includes a Find & Follow Planning Workshop and 12 content coaching sessions. Your ScreenSteps coach will help your content author(s) learn best practices and how to leverage ScreenSteps authoring tools to write clear guides.
With the Train Implementation Package, you get everything in the Guide Implementation Package. Additionally, it includes coaching on how to create training materials as well as coaching sessions to train your trainers on the Find & Follow sessions.
These coaching and implementation packages cost between $3,500 and $5,000.
Option 3: Hire ScreenSteps to help launch Find & Follow
But, what if your team doesn't have the time or resources to do this on their own?
We find that a lot of organizations don't have the resources to throw at the initial project. They have sufficient resources to maintain a Find & Follow program, but they don't have the bandwidth to create the initial content.
That is where our team can help.
Who do you need?
While ScreenSteps will create the digital guides, your team will still need to participate in a Find & Follow Planning Workshop. This is about 4-5 hours upfront and helps us organize which content needs to be created.
Then you will need to designate:
- A point person that our ScreenSteps team can contact with questions
- An individual or team that will be able to review and approve the digital guides that the ScreenSteps team imports and creates
What will we do?
We can come in and do the following:
- We observe your current training sessions (optional)
- We gather your existing documentation and training materials
- We create all of the digital guides, foundational courses, and practice activities — your team just needs to verify their accuracy
- We deliver you a training program that your training team can implement immediately
How long will it take?
The time it takes for our team to launch depends on two main factors:
- The accuracy and completeness of your existing documentation and training guides
- The accessibility to your information systems (to take screenshots and make videos)
If your existing documentation and training guides are accurate and complete, and our team can access your information systems, then we can launch your Find & Follow Training Program in 2-4 weeks. We have found that we need to create between 30-50 guides.
If there are no guides, guides are outdated, and/or our team can’t access the information systems, then launching will depend on how available your team is for interviewing and recording procedures via Zoom. In these situations, it’s best to plan for 6-8 weeks.
Recently, we built a Find & Follow program for a customer. In just a few weeks, they dropped training time by 50% without having to devote any resources to creating new guides.
What does it cost?
The cost is typically between $10,000 and $50,000 depending on the complexity of your business operations and the number of guides and training materials you need created.
This is all part of our Accelerated Implementation plan. Get more information on what the Accelerated Implementation Package includes here.
Which option is right for you?
You can successfully launch a Find & Follow organization with all three options, but which option is right for your company?
If you want to do this by spending as little as possible, do it yourself.
If you want to launch quickly but still create the guides yourself, choose the coaching option.
If you want to do this as fast as possible while putting as small a burden on your team as possible, use our Accelerated Package.
Beware: If you don’t set hard deadlines, your implementation could drag on. I’ve seen companies take a year to implement simply because they didn’t prioritize it. They missed out on thousands in ROI because they didn’t launch sooner.
If this is an all-hands-on-deck scenario, having extra hands who are experts can relieve some of the pressure.
Our experts have experience implementing Find & Follow, so they know the signs of when things are off-course. They can help direct your implementation so you don’t waste precious time.
Set yourself up to succeed with your Find & Follow launch
Whether you decide you have the resources to build your Find & Follow program yourself or you need our team to help accelerate your launch, it is well worth the effort.
When your employees can Find & Follow your policies, your supervisors will be less stressed, your employees will be more confident, and your customers will be thrilled as they receive excellent customer service.
Our team at ScreenSteps wants your team to succeed. Companies who have adopted a ScreenSteps knowledge base and implemented Find & Follow have seen impressive results, including:
- Training new agents 87% faster
- Decreasing Average Handle Time from 20 minutes to 6 minutes
- Maintained performance despite major operational and software changes
Not sure which option is right for your company? We can help!
Schedule a time to talk to a ScreenSteps representative. Our experts will help direct you so you can make the decision that will best set your company up for success.
