Training Customer-facing and Back-office Employees to Adapt to Change
Most training and documentation programs are designed without any consideration for change. This is a huge mistake.
It’s like printing out a five-day weather forecast and expecting it to stay accurate indefinitely.
The reality is that what was true yesterday may no longer be true today—and it’s even less likely to be true a week from now.
If you don’t start with a plan for change, then you are planning to fail.
The Typical Approach
The vast majority of training programs for customer-facing and back-office employees rely on the following:
Instructor-led training
Documented SOPs on a shared drive (or even in a binder)
Shadowing
All of these resources either directly or indirectly encourage employees to memorize procedures.
That is fine if things are going to change. However, memorized procedures become a liability when change happens.
Employees must unlearn what they already know and re-memorize a new procedure. This is never a clean transition. You end up with everyone following their own version of a procedure that includes a little of the old, a little of the new, and a little of stuff they just made up on their own.
What If We Trained Them To Adapt To Change?
With the Find & Follow Framework, you embrace and build change into your training. We know the weather will change daily, so we train employees to look at the weather report instead of memorizing what the weather was like last week.
What does this look like? Employees learn foundational knowledge and then practice finding and following actionable knowledge.
They don’t memorize the details of procedures and because they haven’t memorized information, they can quickly adapt when procedures get updated.
How Clients Have Applied These Principles
Let’s look at some real-world examples of how this can play out.
In the contact center of one client, it used to take two weeks for a change to get pushed through the center. They had to rotate people on and off the phones to get them trained.
After adopting Find & Follow, change happened within an hour. Employees were notified of the change and paid closer attention the next time they used the guide.
In another organization, they used to batch all of their system changes together to have a big training session for everyone.
Once they implemented Find & Follow, they were able to push changes out whenever they wanted. Employees were prepared to adapt to these changes. This meant they could be much more agile and introduce changes in smaller chunks instead of overwhelming employees with a flood of changes all at once.
A Strategy for Adapting to Change
Find & Follow is designed from the ground up with change in mind. It assumes change will happen, and when you plan for change, you will be set up for success.
Next Steps
Take our free course: Find & Follow Basics
Check out our Find & Follow webinars
Pick up the book