How to Use ScreenSteps to Support Employees After a Cloud Implementation [Video]

If your team is about to implement a new cloud system in your business, ScreenSteps can help you run a great training event.

But what about after the training event is over? How can you continue to use ScreenSteps to support employees as your new system evolves?

There’s usually a big focus on the training event itself and a lot of learning assets get created in ScreenSteps to support that training event.

However, there’s not a lot of focus on how to support employees after the training event. Kind of like when you get a pet. It’s fun to get everything ready for when you bring home a new hamster, but you also need to have a plan for the day-to-day feeding and cleaning. 

But post-implementation support must be a priority. After you roll out customized software to your company, your company is on the hook for supporting all of your users on that new software.

As someone who has worked for a software company for eight years and helped many companies implement ScreenSteps' knowledge base software, I've learned a few keys to getting total buy-in for your new software.

You need to have a plan for how you’re going to support your team. Watch the video below for three simple tips for how you can support employees following a cloud implementation:

1. Coordinate the handoff between the group in charge of training and the group in charge of supporting.
2. Make it easy for your employees to ask questions and for your support to answer questions.
3. Continue to update and create learning assets that employees can reference.

1. Coordinate the handoff

Most cloud implementation projects ask different departments to handle specific phases. Often, it's the L&D team or the IT team that is in charge of preparing learning materials for the initial launch.

This usually means that those teams own ScreenSteps.

But, after the initial training event, a different department (or departments) will take responsibility for supporting employees. However, these new groups don’t often share in the ownership of ScreenSteps.

What tends to happen is that they start to create their own learning resources to answer employee questions as they come in.

For example, if your employees are getting support by email or through chat, it’s common for the support team to begin writing out answers in the email or chat or creating Word documents with step-by-step instructions and screenshots

Not only is that a waste of time (because they’re creating duplicate learning assets), but as things change in the system, your ScreenSteps resources aren’t getting updated to reflect those changes.

What you end up with is a ScreenSteps knowledge base that is kind of accurate and a bunch of job aids/tutorials floating around SharePoint, email, and chat.

📽️ Watch Related: 3 Steps To Set Up ScreenSteps For Cloud Implementation Training

Allow teams to capture the complexities of your new system

Something else that happens is that each department and each team will begin to build on the foundation of what they learned, and they will continue to define and refine their own processes and procedures that weren’t part of the original training and weren’t documented in ScreenSteps.

If these groups aren’t allowed to create learning assets like how-to guides, procedures, and checklists in ScreenSteps, they’ll create them someplace else.

The result is that within a few months of implementing your new system, your ScreenSteps learning resources become outdated, incomplete, and unreliable.

Your employees no longer have a one-stop-shop for answers, so they have to continue asking around for help. Alternatively, your employees do things incorrectly and make things up as they go, or they simply just don’t adopt the new system.

As you transition from your formal training event to ongoing support, coordinate a plan for allowing the support team and other teams to create content in ScreenSteps.

2. Facilitate questions

You actually want employees asking questions about how to use the new system. That’s a good thing. It means they’re in the new system and trying to do things correctly.

Make it easy for them to submit questions to reliable sources (and prevent them from just tapping their neighbor on the shoulder and getting a "Here's how I do it" kind of answer). Offer a chat or email address that is solely for asking questions about the new system.

Make it easy for support to respond

You also want to make it easy for your support team to quickly respond. As you get your support team involved with using ScreenSteps, they can quickly respond to questions by including links to your ScreenSteps learning assets. And, they can resolve questions much faster and with a lot more clarity.

As your employees get responses to their questions with links to ScreenSteps, they’ll begin noticing that they can get great answers by just going to your ScreenSteps knowledge base.

Eventually, they’ll go there first when they need help, which is a great thing for you! Your support team will see fewer emails come through and your employees will reference your resources when they perform procedures (reducing mistakes).

It's a win-win.

3. Continue to update and create learning assets

All parties who are responsible for maintaining procedures (e.g. SMEs, L&E, IT, Managers) should continue to update and create learning assets in ScreenSteps.

As your system begins to evolve and change, your ScreenSteps articles will get outdated and become incomplete.

L&D needs to keep them fresh by using them in their new-hire training, continuous learning, and support efforts. For example, as L&D prepares for training, they might notice that ScreenSteps doesn't have the learning assets they need. So they'll create new articles. Or they'll notice that some articles are outdated, so they'll update them.

When your support team gets questions, they’ll do that as well. When they get a question that doesn’t have an answer in ScreenSteps, the support team will create a new article and respond with a link to that new article.

Or they’ll notice that the answer in ScreenSteps is outdated or incomplete, so they’ll make an update first and then send a response with a link to that article.

As managers or SMEs formulate procedures, they can create their own learning assets specific to their team and nobody else (e.g. how-to articles and checklists). They will become responsible for keeping their own resources up to date and accurate, which they’ll do as their team uses ScreenSteps and notices content gaps.

Make a plan for how you'll use ScreenSteps after implementation

When you apply these three tips, you provide your employees with an amazing resource to help them do their job. Plus, you keep the momentum going by encouraging them to use the new system.

With ScreenSteps, every process and procedure is documented and transparent. Employees don’t waste days looking for information to do their job because it’s all in one place. You have a resource that’s always ready to be used for new-hire training and continuous learning, development, and support.

If you’d like help with applying any of these tips, reach out to the ScreenSteps team or your consulting partner. Our team can help you create a plan so that your company can fully adopt ScreenSteps.