How to Get Your Team On Board
Adding a new tool to your team's workflow might sound simple, but like changing any habit you are bound to encounter resistance at some point.
This article will give you some practical tips structured according to the ADKAR model for change management.
1. Build Awareness
Make sure to communicate the why of Slite to your team before you introduce the tool and dive into the technicalities. It is important to have the problem you are looking to address clear, and the risk of not acting on this. An example of this could be:
Our knowledge is scattered amongst different tools. The risk of this is that:
The team spends 20% of their time looking for information, that is one day a week!
SME's have to answer the same questions over and over again. It interupts their day to day work, and created a lot of noise in our main communication system (e.g. Slack).
Policies get diluted by playing telephone, each person will have their version that they on their turn teach to the next person.
The lack of transparency makes that teams operate in silos and sometimes duplicate work.
It slows down new employee onboarding and impacts their experience in a negative way.
The lack of clarity results in slower execution.
A fun way to build awareness is to use Slite's Time Savings Calculator:
2. Create Desire
It's one thing to understand the company's needs for a knowledge management tool, but to get people's buy-in they need to be able to see how it will benefit them. A great way to get people engaged is by running a survey to assess people's needs.
Some of our customers start a single-question thread in Slack, others choose to run a multi-question survey in a more formal way. Examples of questions could be:
What kind of information are you missing to autonomously perform your role?
What kind of information takes you a lot of time to gather?
Which type of company and team updates do you miss?
Which outdated information should we update first?
3. Develop Knowledge
One of the benefits of Slite is that it has a low learning curve. The doc below is a template you can copy over to your own workspace, modify, and instruct people on how to use Slite.
[template] Slite guidelines
After sharing some resources you can give people access to the account and encourage them to try the editor in their private channel. Using the / command allows them to create beautiful docs from scratch on no-time.
4. Foster Ability
Once your team has access to Slite and understands the basics, have them start with low-effort / high-reward use cases. These could come from the survey, but if there are no clear winners indicated, using Slite for your company handbook or HR policies can be a great starting point.
5. Reinforce Changes
A knowledge base is only as valuable as the information it holds, so you would like to see continuous active participation. You can keep an eye on the activity in your account via Settings > Workspace Analytics. Here you will see real-time data that lets you detect and address any issues in time.
Next to that, our Knowledge Management panel lets you asses the health and usage of the content in your account. The following article contains more information:
Knowledge Management
Next to keeping an eye on the usage metrics we also recommend gathering feedback from the users. This could be done in an informal way, by reaching out to the channel admins, or by running a survey for all users.