Resources from the episode:

15 tips to effectively manage remote employees

Transcript of the interview:

Docebo 0:06
Welcome back to the learning elevated podcast brought to you by docebo. The show where we help you elevate your learning efforts and move up in the world of enterprise learning and development. guiding you on your journey up the tower, we’ll be your elevator operators, myself, Rob Ayre, and my co-host, Kerri Moore.

Now each week, we stopped off at a new floor. And today we’re getting off on the 15th floor, the law office where one of our customers Doprocess are speaking with us about successful remote working. Now this is obviously incredibly current with everything that has been happening over the last few weeks and months. But you know, this is something that we all face at various points in our careers when perhaps teams are in a different country or maybe even just in a different office to us. And you know, how do we get them engaged in our learning activities, and how do we provide something that is actually going to be useful for them throughout that career? Yeah, I think most organizations right now are facing That challenge. It’s like, Okay, how do I respond to the times? How do I make sure that that my people are still growing and developing? Or, you know, how do I just make sure that they’re still connecting and sharing some of those best practices that maybe would have otherwise only been shared via word of mouth?

Right? So definitely a very topical sort of conversation to be had. It was it was great to chat with due process. And, and so, you know, in kicking this off, we were able to find an article on elearning industry that was all about remote work, remote workforce training and sort of a guide on how to do it. And I think they had some important sort of ideas there. And, you know, one of the first things that they put as making sure it was possible is just make your courses simple and easy to access. So if people are working remotely, they’re not typically going to be at their, you know, their desk station or, you know, have have all the proper fixings that are typically associated with the office. And so the more barriers to entry that you make for people to take your content, probably the less They’re actually gonna take it. Exactly. I mean, that’s something that you really are going to struggle to monitor as well when people are at home. So yeah, it’s really important to make that something that they can just jump on to without thinking.

Another thing that I really liked about this as well as it spoke again, about making sure that you have training that is super interactive, so that you’re getting that really positive learning experience. Because you know, rule at home at the moment and flicking our thumbs, you know, and a bit kind of like disorientated with everything that’s going on. But if you create an environment where people actually want to go into they’re having a nice time, perhaps there’s some social learning involved in there, too. So they can see what that P is about what they found, then it’s really going to help people stay within that platform and keep on track, basically. Yeah, I think I think the last point that I want to kind of bring up from this article that I think’s important to this conversation is, how is your technology enabling you as an organization to monitor your learner’s engagement and their performance? I think it’s one of those areas that most l&d professionals really do Think about it on a regular basis, like how do I actually put these these things into practice, but then monitor it, make sure it’s working, iterate on it if it’s not, but especially in times when people are fully remote, because you don’t have those, you know, watercooler check in so you don’t have the boardroom you don’t have the the informal opportunities to see how well people are engaging and how well people are doing. So having a tool in place that allows you to really sort of track and see that I think I think can really go a long way. Absolutely. It’s super important. And now that we’re moving on to our interview now because I think we’re getting off at the next stop. So we have Terry here from due process and we have a fantastic interview for you. So hope you guys enjoy we’ll see you after.

We’re so excited today to be joined by Terry Cale of Doprocess. Terry, let’s kick things off today and bring everybody up to speed on Doprocess’ training program.

Terry Cale 4:02
Sure, so Doprocess is a software company based in Canada. And we have a training, we have a couple different training programs. We have training for our internal staff as we are creating new applications and new programs as well as training for all of our external customers across the country.

Docebo 4:22
And can you tell us a little bit about some of the content that you guys serve to those audiences?

Terry Cale 4:27
Yeah, we have a wide variety, variety of content because we have so many different people and so many different ways that people learn. So we have a lot of micro learning content through the LMS through our university system. We have a lot of live webinars, recorded webinars. We have full end to end certification training processes, just Yeah, a wide fryer variety. I can’t speak today. variety of stuff, just to make sure that all of our different learners are doing getting the information they need in an effective way.

Docebo 5:03
Very cool. And so, you know, one of the things we want to focus on in today’s conversation is how the global situation with COVID-19 has impacted your business. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Terry Cale 5:15
Absolutely, um, it’s actually created a lot more business for us and a lot more noise for us. We’ve had to, of course, internally change a lot of things around to have all of our developers, all of our support people, everyone now working from home, and having to support that change, as well. All of our customers are going from working in a law office environment, to all of a sudden having to learn themselves, how to work from home, as well as learning new software programs and learning our program and all of those things. So there’s been a lot of change in our world in the last little while.

Docebo 5:54
I can imagine Actually, yeah. So have you found that you’ve had to reconsider your training, delivery and content because of this situation to

Terry Cale 6:02
not necessarily change, we were on a really good path already, okay, with our remote learning and all of that. So what we’ve really had to do is just make sure that we had more, right, more variety, more options, more assets for people to have an access when they need them, as opposed to having to call into our support lines, with people working from home, they’re working all different hours, and we’re not available to them. Absolutely.

Docebo 6:29
So in terms of how you’ve been able to adapt to the situation, both for your internal and your external audiences, what have been some of the things that you’ve learned over the past couple of months that you you’ve kind of, you know, taken his best practice and some of the things that maybe some of our listeners can take away from the episode and say, okay, you know, maybe, maybe I could try this or try that.

Terry Cale 6:49
Yeah, I, I mean, one of the major things that we’ve started doing is a lot more live webinars. So scheduled we’ve had a lot before where we would schedule them one on one. But we’re now scheduling a lot more group webinars for people to attend. And also making sure all of those are posted so that everybody can get access to them right away. We’re also using a lot of the informal learning assets, quickly going in making recordings of things and being able to post them informally so that they’re available to people without us having to create entire courses around them is really helpful because they can go and find that information as quickly as they want. And it’s always going to be there. And

Docebo 7:35
that was something I was going to ask you actually said that you’ve had to create a lot more content. So how are you going about that? Are you relying on like user generated content? Or are you getting your subject matter experts to start stepping in or you be purchasing content? What does that look like for you?

Terry Cale 7:49
It’s a lot of our subject matter experts are creating that content. Yeah, right. We don’t have a lot of users that are willing to generate content for us at this point. Yeah. Oh, A lot of that is because we are moving. Well, part of this is moving all of our customers from a program that they’re used to using that is a desktop program over to a web based program. So they’re learning it themselves. So they’re not comfortable generating content for us at this time. But we do have seven subject matter experts that are able to go in and as we have frequently asked questions, or the webinars that they’re hosting, they have the same questions asked or over and over there, we can quickly generate content for those things so that we can just direct them to that later.

Docebo 8:33
That’s fantastic. Terry, one of the things that I kind of hear come up a lot and I think it’s fairly relevant in your situation, when you are making that type of a transition, how are you enabling individuals internally and externally to just know what they need to know in order to make the transition and know how to use the new system that’s that’s different from what they might have previously used?

Terry Cale 8:56
Well, we have a three months transitions schedule. So we start three months ahead of time informing people when they’re going to be making the transition and getting them ready with all of the things that they need. So checking their system to make sure that they meet all of our system requirements, signing up for a live training webinar, giving them access to different guides that they’re going to need when they log in the first day. So we spend the first three months really getting them prepared for making a move like this. And then once they finally do get into our program, we have a ton of different things, including the LMS. We call this our university where they have direct access, single sign on from our application into that, as well as in application help and tip that really directs them back to the university and the content on there.

Docebo 9:48
That’s great. Do you think that any of the changes that you’ve made because of the situation right now, whether that be working from home or anything else that you guys are doing? Do you think that you’ll be keeping any of those and the more permanent level

Terry Cale 10:00
I think it’s too early to say for sure right now, we don’t know where things are going to be going. Some of them definitely will be keeping. Like I said, we were already well positioned, we had five subject matter experts. So I don’t see them going away. We will keep generating content and things like that. I assume some people will continue to work from home, there will be some people that they really want to go back into the office. So yeah, it’s really hard to say where the organizational take it from there.

Docebo 10:30
So going back to that sort of idea of the user generated content, being the urine in a period of transition, this question probably is a little bit more forward looking. But, you know, have you guys sort of started to give thought to how you will encourage that type of user behavior. I know a lot of the times it’s it sort of all in that that idea of building that culture of learning and maybe setting certain expectations but you know, forward looking what is what what kind of processes are you thinking about putting in plays or or sort of tools in order to encourage that type of activity.

Terry Cale 11:00
Yeah, I mean, encouragement is really what we need to do. We try to keep it as interactive as possible. So we have frequently asked questions on there, we have an ideas portal on there, to try to get people to continue engaging with that. As I said before, we have a lot of pop ups, right in our application that asks people to go back to the university and get more information about things. So I think when we get to a point where we’re ready to open it up to user generated content, hopefully everything that we’re doing right now will have that engagement already, and people will be more willing to start posting their own things.

Docebo 11:38
Yeah, it is that it is that encouragement kind of level, right, where you have to set a certain level of expectation, but also kind of enable them in order to do the things that they want to do. And so you know, having now updated your delivery model in the sort of the preparation for the situation that you have now. Is there anything else that you guys are kind of starting to try to put in place in order to get the right Learning in front of the right people, you know there any other types of things that you can kind of speak to?

Terry Cale 12:05
Um, I think right now we’re we’re just trying to catch our breath yet, because things are moving so quickly. And we have changed a lot of things in a very short period of time. So I think at this point, it’s really we’re trying to catch our breath and assess what we’ve done. And what is working really well and how we can expand on that, like the the new webinars that we’re hosting, and the ones that we’re starting to post on LinkedIn and stuff like that. How can we expand that into the summer months where we hadn’t planned on doing a lot of these things, and focus it on more areas of the application and not just the new functionality that we’re currently doing it for and stuff like that? And can we do a series can we do this? Can we do that? So it’s really we’re looking at those things, as soon as we get a little bit of time to really focus on them.

Docebo 12:54
Very cool. Yeah. Something I was going to ask her on that as well. Is that um, have you noticed any any significant change And kind of like uptick or an engagement or anything since you guys have been at home as anything changed for you so far it’s busier.

Terry Cale 13:10
I is a much busier with everybody at home.

Docebo 13:13
Wow. Okay, anything in particular that seems to any kind of format that seems to be good doing well other than your webinars or is it all pretty across the board?

Terry Cale 13:21
It’s across the board. Yeah, we definitely are much we’re seeing uptake in everything right now. I was just actually looking at the university yesterday and earlier today, and a lot more people have been in there in the last couple days. We also had a large release over the weekend, but a lot more people have been in.

Docebo 13:39
That’s great to know. Well, Terry, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I hope that our listeners are able to walk away with a lot of useful information. And yeah, once again, thank you so much for joining us.

Terry Cale 13:50
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was great.

Docebo 13:52
Thanks, Terry.

Thank you again to Terry Cale. What a fantastic talk we have with her. It sounds like this working remotely is going really well for her and her team.

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that they seem to be doing is really thinking consciously about it. They’re doing the things that they need to do to make sure that the learning platform kind of becomes a recognized place for activities while they are on that remote work kind of lifestyle, which i think it’s it’s just so important, when yet this thing could exist. But if you don’t put in the right kind of strategies or systems in place to encourage people to go back and to interact with the platform in ways that you sort of deem necessary, then, yeah, people probably aren’t going to use it.

Exactly. I think they’ve been really inventive with the different types of content that they’re using to make sure there’s lots of variety and learners are getting what they need. And that keeps me interested as well. So I think that is definitely a key thing to their success. Yeah, no, I think one of the other things too, is just on the actual content creation side of things so that they’re sort of informally creating content you know, it’s it’s it’s better than just not creating it at all. Yeah, absolutely. Like it’s not perfect. Just kind of gets to the bones of what they need to know. And people are consuming it and they’re having a good time. I completely agree.

Yes, and speaking of working from home, I think I just heard my dog barking in the background. You know, that’s just, it’s one of those things. But you know, it’s funny, like, I feel like, even if you had people creating content the same way that due process does, it’s okay, similar to this podcast, if it’s not perfect, right, like, like, I think that that’s like such a truth to creating content into into sort of encouraging people to do it is like, if you set some sort of wildly high expectation for absolutely everything that goes in there. People are going to be intimidated, right? And they’re not going to they’re not going to go about doing it just because like, Oh man, I can’t reach this sort of like unrecovered unrealizable goal like that. Like you have to be kind of just okay with the fact that knowledge is knowledge, and it doesn’t have to always have a big shiny bow. That’s exactly right. And it’s human.

And you’re exactly right. When you say about us working from home and the things that interrupt us there, I mean, the same things are going to be in the Within the LMS, as well, so people are going to have the rest of their lives to deal with. And so yeah, as you say, making something that’s just a bit more human that takes into account everything that’s going on less pressure is going to be the best bet for sure. Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the final things to that I bet I really enjoyed about about hearing from Terry is just that they have seen actively that there are more people in the systems while they’re working remotely. You know, and Kerri, you know, you and I both have seen this both in through our own sort of data internally, through our colleagues and I know just from from personal experience that I want to learn people want to learn and right now, people do you have the time to learn, I mean, assuming you don’t have you know, little ones at home and all that kind of stuff, but you’re still probably even a day let’s say your kid goes down for a nap but to your you don’t want to jump right back into work.

You still want to make sure that you’re being productive, you’re gonna probably want to learn something. Exactly. So this is the time everybody listening to get your courses up to date and get people into the LMS because they really do want to have that results right now for sure. So anyway, thank you so much. much for joining us for this interview was fantastic and next week we’re going to be right back here with some fresh new content See you then.

For more information on what we’ve discussed today, including links to resources and downloadable assets, go to docebo.com/podcast that’s d-o-c-e-b-o.com/podcast, and subscribe to our newsletter. You can also find us on iTunes, Spotify and all other places where you get your podcasts by searching learning elevated, so don’t forget to click subscribe so you know when we’re disembarking on another floor.