Five practices for organizing lifelong learning as a team
Continuing education is not a luxury for IT companies, but a means of survival. To compete, teams have to quickly and regularly update their skills in accordance with market changes. Of course, you can encourage advanced training for each employee individually, and this has its effect. However, sooner or later, growing companies are faced with the fact that it is necessary to bring training processes to a uniform view in order to make them more effective and to consciously promote their importance among employees.
This is just the case of Wrike. Over the past six months, the company has grown three times, a lot of new functionality has appeared in the product, and we had to sit down and carefully think about how we see the training processes in a team so as not to let them go by their own accord. We have summarized our experience into five main practices, which we want to talk about.
1. Beginner Onboarding
This is the first and perhaps most important stage of continuing education. Quickly arriving beginners have led us to develop and implement a single process of introductory course (onboarding). It is also important here that we at the company ourselves manage work processes through Wrike, so it was important to explain all the nuances of using the service before a person started to work.
Active training now takes about a week for regular employees and three months for a support team, which requires a thorough knowledge of the product. Ideally, such training includes a game form, different training formats (since different people prefer different forms of perception of information) and is dedicated not only to the product or work responsibilities, but also to the creation of informal relationships with the team.
Today onboarding in Wrike is built from such elements.
2. Development environment
Horizontal and vertical development within the company is beneficial to everyone. The company saves energy and resources on finding new employees and gets a specialist who is familiar with the specifics of work, and employees are more interested in learning and staying at the same place of work. Ultimately, effective study is possible only with good motivation and understanding how to apply the acquired knowledge. Therefore, for the role of team leaders and departments in Wrike, first of all, the candidates of those who already work in the company are considered, which allows you to maintain already established relations within the team. We have an example of how a person who came to us five years ago as a support specialist created and now heads the analytics department at Wrike from scratch.
Of course, leadership requires a separate set of skills, in addition to professional ones. We separately take care of the training of managers, speakers at conferences and those who conduct interviews - an internal training system has been developed for them, which helps to develop appropriate soft skills.
3. Feedback
Feedback provides an opportunity to see their “blind spots” and take a fresh look at the quality of their work and their role in the team. Wrike regularly uses three types of feedback:
4. General knowledge base.
Any company accumulates a large amount of relevant information that must be stored in the public domain for the team - from popular Q & As to the list of applications used and descriptions of work processes. The question is how to structure it better. In Wrike, each team creates its own knowledge base in a form convenient for itself - it can be a folder with a list of tasks in the system, a set of presentations, or short instructional videos. By the way, this greatly accelerates the introduction of new people into the course of business, so acquaintance with such a base can also be part of the introductory course.
5. Exchange of experience between departments
The more the company grows, the worse the employees have an idea of what is happening outside their department. Meanwhile, if you establish links between departments, you can find new and original ways to interact and solve problems. At Wrike, we use several formats.
Firstly, there are team breakfasts at which each of the departments takes turns talking about their work in a playful way. You can attract the maximum number of people by any means - from holding an auction to treating with champagne.
Secondly, visiting sessions twice a year - in January and July - help to summarize the results of six months of work. Their program consists of speeches by both managers and employees, so that you can get a complete picture of what different teams did in a year. Since the Wrike team is distributed between countries, one of the sessions was traditionally held in Mexico and the other in Russia. Perhaps in the near future Dublin will also be added here, because in addition to exchanging successes, this is a great occasion to meet colleagues from other offices.
And finally, I want to talk about the hackathon - a successful experiment of this year. About 100 volunteers from different departments united in 20 teams and worked on creating a prototype for any idea that would help us significantly increase our client base. Typically, such a team was a cross-functional group of developers, designers and marketers, and the spirit of competition and time limits significantly contributed to the convergence of employees and the development of new knowledge. We won’t talk about the works of the winners, probably they will be reflected in the functionality of Wrike in the very near future.
This is just the case of Wrike. Over the past six months, the company has grown three times, a lot of new functionality has appeared in the product, and we had to sit down and carefully think about how we see the training processes in a team so as not to let them go by their own accord. We have summarized our experience into five main practices, which we want to talk about.
1. Beginner Onboarding
This is the first and perhaps most important stage of continuing education. Quickly arriving beginners have led us to develop and implement a single process of introductory course (onboarding). It is also important here that we at the company ourselves manage work processes through Wrike, so it was important to explain all the nuances of using the service before a person started to work.
Active training now takes about a week for regular employees and three months for a support team, which requires a thorough knowledge of the product. Ideally, such training includes a game form, different training formats (since different people prefer different forms of perception of information) and is dedicated not only to the product or work responsibilities, but also to the creation of informal relationships with the team.
Today onboarding in Wrike is built from such elements.
- Passing the quest for new users inside the product with watching training videos and performing basic actions.
- Watching a webinar on how Wrike works and attending a training session in which we talk about how we use the service internally.
- Global onboarding, where executives talk about their role in the company and how they see its development. In our case, a team distributed around the world is especially important for employees in different countries to have a single vision of the product and its goals.
- Breakfast for beginners, where old and new team members can meet and learn more about who does what. Usually we try to invite employees from different departments, so that informal relations develop between them.
2. Development environment
Horizontal and vertical development within the company is beneficial to everyone. The company saves energy and resources on finding new employees and gets a specialist who is familiar with the specifics of work, and employees are more interested in learning and staying at the same place of work. Ultimately, effective study is possible only with good motivation and understanding how to apply the acquired knowledge. Therefore, for the role of team leaders and departments in Wrike, first of all, the candidates of those who already work in the company are considered, which allows you to maintain already established relations within the team. We have an example of how a person who came to us five years ago as a support specialist created and now heads the analytics department at Wrike from scratch.
Of course, leadership requires a separate set of skills, in addition to professional ones. We separately take care of the training of managers, speakers at conferences and those who conduct interviews - an internal training system has been developed for them, which helps to develop appropriate soft skills.
3. Feedback
Feedback provides an opportunity to see their “blind spots” and take a fresh look at the quality of their work and their role in the team. Wrike regularly uses three types of feedback:
- Monthly meetings 1: 1 with the leader, during which the employee receives feedback about his work and can talk about his difficulties and wishes. Compared to team meetings, such meetings strengthen personal interaction.
- Peer review - assessment of a task (part of a code, marketing text, design element) by a colleague who gives feedback and offers opportunities for improvement. Since this is an exchange of views between equal employees, this feedback is not necessary for implementation, and the final decision is left to the executor of the task. This approach allows you to collect several opinions and get rid of subjectivity, which can significantly affect, for example, in the preparation of marketing materials.
- Review 360 is a method of evaluating employees, which is carried out by his entire working environment. Twice a year, we send out anonymous questionnaires with questions about the work of team leaders to their subordinates, bosses and colleagues. This method is aimed at assessing professional skills, identifying problematic issues in teamwork and telling about the positive experience of working with this person. Answers to open questions help to understand how a person acts, being in different roles in a team.
4. General knowledge base.
Any company accumulates a large amount of relevant information that must be stored in the public domain for the team - from popular Q & As to the list of applications used and descriptions of work processes. The question is how to structure it better. In Wrike, each team creates its own knowledge base in a form convenient for itself - it can be a folder with a list of tasks in the system, a set of presentations, or short instructional videos. By the way, this greatly accelerates the introduction of new people into the course of business, so acquaintance with such a base can also be part of the introductory course.
5. Exchange of experience between departments
The more the company grows, the worse the employees have an idea of what is happening outside their department. Meanwhile, if you establish links between departments, you can find new and original ways to interact and solve problems. At Wrike, we use several formats.
Firstly, there are team breakfasts at which each of the departments takes turns talking about their work in a playful way. You can attract the maximum number of people by any means - from holding an auction to treating with champagne.
Secondly, visiting sessions twice a year - in January and July - help to summarize the results of six months of work. Their program consists of speeches by both managers and employees, so that you can get a complete picture of what different teams did in a year. Since the Wrike team is distributed between countries, one of the sessions was traditionally held in Mexico and the other in Russia. Perhaps in the near future Dublin will also be added here, because in addition to exchanging successes, this is a great occasion to meet colleagues from other offices.
And finally, I want to talk about the hackathon - a successful experiment of this year. About 100 volunteers from different departments united in 20 teams and worked on creating a prototype for any idea that would help us significantly increase our client base. Typically, such a team was a cross-functional group of developers, designers and marketers, and the spirit of competition and time limits significantly contributed to the convergence of employees and the development of new knowledge. We won’t talk about the works of the winners, probably they will be reflected in the functionality of Wrike in the very near future.