Educating coworkers

I would like to discuss something that always bothered me. I work in a small company (~160 people, 2 offices, LA-NY, 2.5 IT staff). As you imagine, we wear a lot of hats. (I do some software development, network, virtualization.)

A lot of times, I help with support tickets and questions from people. I see a lot of people lacking basic things, so they use the available tools inefficiently. My idea— what I presented to managers—was to send out a survey or ask users what the biggest problems they experience are. (Obviously, somewhat focused way.)

Does anybody have recommendations on how to find pain points (=things that hold back users)? If not, what would be the main topics that could benefit the most? (Password management, how to use common tools like Outlook, Okta, what is 2FA, etc.)

Thank you!

I will start by quoting what Henry Ford allegedly said about asking people for input “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Mostly people don’t know what they are missing and don’t know it’s a pain point because they are often unaware there is a better way. When I worked in corporate my method for solving this is to sit with people and have them walk through their workflows while I observed. This was and is still how I look at things today to figure out what can be done better. There are some things you could ask such as “Do you copy data from one place to another?” because anytime that is happening there is room for improvement, but overall the average worker simply knows their job is to push some buttons in the order they were trained on until their shift is over.

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First point of call ,

Look at your support tickets and see what issues come up all the time.

Yes, you are right. I burnt myself several times by thinking people knew their needs. Sitting down might seem time-consuming, but I see it could have a much better outcome.

Thanks!

In November, we switched to Zammad from Salesforce Cases. That system allows us to tag, search, and look back. This is valuable.
But there are hidden things, like workflows that are inherited and they “work”. Those never reach the support queue.

One small win I implemented today is a VPN reminder in Okta. I can warn users if they need a VPN connection for certain services.

I 100% agree with @LTS_Tom. That method is the best way. I’ve been doing this for 15+ years. Usually its a management problem because they don’t want change. It is also a culture thing in most org’s.

I don’t know how many times someone comes to me with a problem and I can mostly automate or completely automate what they are doing to save someone hours of work.

I’d say you have to have the business (upper management) be willing to take a look at processes and procedures and WANT the IT staff to make it better. Otherwise you have a never ending fight.

Yes, this is what I am facing right now. One day, they agreed to some updates. Another day, we have different priorities.
Watching them doing the same inefficient things. Nobody wants to stop, change, or improve…not even when the business is slow.

But I will try to sit down with people who are willing to learn.

Completely agree with that, in the UK we have a lot of low skilled people who sit in front of PC’s. Saving them hours means they then have to do something else, that is a clear threat ! It’s definitely a culture thing, if you are with high performing individuals you can achieve a lot, if not well you will struggle and for sure won’t be thanked for your efforts.

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