Launching a new knowledge base or other knowledge management tool takes a lot of work.
The unfortunate thing is many companies put a lot of time and effort into launching a new resource, but then their employees don’t use it. Often, that’s because the knowledge base is missing critical guides or those guides are inaccurate or incomplete.
It feels like all that money and work goes to waste. And we didn’t want that to happen to our ScreenSteps customers.
So we developed the Find & Follow Framework. The Find & Follow Framework is a method for transferring knowledge quicker and more efficiently to your employees.
A critical part of that framework is the Find & Follow Workshop. The workshop helps teams plan their knowledge base resources so that all their effort doesn’t go to waste.
What is a Find & Follow Workshop? And how does it help you implement your knowledge base faster and achieve more success?
For a quick overview of a Find & Follow Workshop, watch the 3-minute video below. Then continue reading for a more detailed explanation.
What is a Find & Follow Workshop?
A Find & Follow Workshop is a planning session that helps your company identify what your employees need to be able to DO to succeed in their roles.
The purpose of a Find & Follow Workshop is to:
- Align your operations and training teams
- Define the activities that your employees will need to perform using the knowledge base (i.e. the tasks they need to perform, the questions they need to answer, and the problems they need to solve)
- Identify the nuances and variables that might make those activities more complicated than you might expect
A Find & Follow Workshop is used to determine the activities of a specific role in your organization. So you would repeat the workshop for each role. These could be for a call center rep, a back-office worker, etc.
3 action items from your Find & Follow Workshop
The workshop typically takes between 1.5–3 hours. The discussion helps you list out all the questions and tasks that people in a specific role need to do.
We use a Find & Follow Workbook to help you take notes and organize everything your planning committee identifies and agrees on during the workshop.
This is a list of all the knowledge you need to transfer. Now, transferring knowledge is not equivalent to memorization. Knowledge transfer includes continuous learning, specifically learning by doing.
So an employee learns enough to be able to find and follow a digital guide without making mistakes.
At the end of your workshop, you have a Find & Follow Report. The report is a summary of the digital guides you need to create, the sub-tasks and variables that you need to account for, and the background knowledge that employees will need to use the guides successfully.
Ultimately, what you’ve done is you’ve identified three resources you need to create:
- Foundational training courses
- Digital guides
- Practice activities you should run during training
The Find & Follow Workshop helps you prepare to launch your knowledge ops platform (or similar centralized knowledge management system). Also, it helps you train more confident, independent, and efficient employees in 30 days or less.
Is a workshop really essential?
YES! Whether you are starting from scratch or optimizing existing processes, a Find & Follow Workshop is essential to set your company up for success.
The workshop becomes extra helpful when:
- You are launching new software
- Merging two or more companies
- Expanding your business
- Undergoing change (both adaptive and/or transformational change)
- And more!
Let’s take a quick look at the outcomes when you don’t do a workshop vs. when you do. Then we’ll take a closer look at some of the results for each scenario.
Without a Workshop |
With a Workshop |
|
|
Training and Operations Teams |
Your teams are not aligned; training and operations still do their own thing |
Your training and operations teams are aligned; they agree on what and how knowledge needs to be transferred |
|
Implementation Plan |
You don’t know what needs to be done and what the priorities are |
You have clear expectations and a timeline for launch |
|
Launch Timeline |
Implementation takes 6-12 months |
Implementation takes 1-3 months |
|
Digital Guides |
You are missing guides or you create the wrong guides |
You know what content needs to be created and which guides are the priority |
|
Training |
You don’t know what needs to be included in training vs. digital guides |
You know what does and doesn’t need to be covered in training |
|
Practice activities |
You have unrealistic practice scenarios during training |
You know exactly which real-life procedures to practice |
Outcomes WITHOUT the workshop
What happens if you skip the workshop? When you get started without the Workshop, your team isn’t aligned. You end up creating the wrong guides and leave out important guides or guides that are incomplete. Employees end up leaving training unprepared to work independently.
Without the workshop, your documentation is incomplete. You are either missing essential digital guides or have digital guides that don’t deal with the reality of what an employee actually needs to DO.
Plus, you don’t know where to start or what to prioritize, so implementation takes longer.
You end up wasting a lot of time because you’re not sure what to create. So you either continue to stall or you make a bunch of content that isn’t very useful because your digital guides don’t adequately address what employees actually need.
Outcomes WITH the workshop
With a Workshop, your training and operations teams are aligned. They have perfect clarity about how to create a seamless training program that will empower employees to be knowledgeable, consistent, efficient, and independent once they leave training.
With a workshop, you have clear expectations about what digital guides you are creating and which digital guides to prioritize. Since your team is aligned, you make fewer mistakes and have clear expectations for launching your knowledge ops platform or knowledge base.
The workshop helps you identify knowledge gaps so critical information doesn’t slip through the cracks.
In the end of the workshop, you have a report that clearly identifies what digital guides, foundational courses, and practice activities you need to create for training and employee support materials. This report helps you coordinate your content creation efforts.
Main Takeaway
In a nutshell, WITHOUT a workshop, implementation takes a long time. WITH a workshop, you launch faster.
Make progress faster with a Find & Follow Workshop
When you are implementing a knowledge base, knowledge ops platform, or other knowledge management tool, a Find & Follow Workshop is essential.
With a Find & Follow Workshop, you have a clear plan that helps you launch faster and create content that you know your employees can use.
The Find & Follow Workbook helps you document everything you discuss in your Find & Follow Workshop. At the end, the filled-out workbook becomes your Find & Follow report. Download the free Find & Follow Workbook here.
Need help running your Find & Follow Workshop?
Schedule a discovery call with a Find & Follow expert to learn how ScreenSteps can help you have a productive Find & Follow Workshop. When companies hire a ScreenSteps expert, it helps them gather all the necessary information so that they can focus on building their Find & Follow Organization.
