Thriving Through Disruption: WalkMe’s Top 5 Business Continuity Takeaways
Like every organization across any industry, we’ve been impacted by the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. WalkMe offices around the world have moved to remote-only work environments, and our teams have had to adapt to maintain the same level of service that our customers expect and stay productive in their varied roles.
As a global, digital-first company, WalkMe has always been friendly to a remote working environment, but no one could have predicted the precise adaptation required to the demands of a global pandemic. That’s why we turned to our solution – a Digital Adoption Platform – to help communicate urgent information and manage change in real-time.
WalkMe’s incredible Director of Marketing, Liz Gilliam, compiled our own best practices for continuity through this crisis and into the Next Normal.
These are WalkMe’s top 5 takeaways for maintaining business continuity during disruption:
- Our environment is continuing to change and we need to be prepared to adapt – fast
- Even digital-first companies should expect an influx of new and different support challenges
- Disruption shouldn’t slow down the transformation strategy
- Understanding and monitoring productivity keeps business moving forward
- Being empathetic about the work-home balance motivates employees
We need to be prepared to adapt – fast
If anything has become clear in recent weeks, it’s that change is constant. And whether you’re adapting to a change in working environments or working through a different challenge, it’s important to have a plan to adapt quickly. We’ve leveraged WalkMe notifications called ‘ShoutOuts’ to:
- Keep teams engaged and informed
- Communicate urgent news
- Manage change
Since working from home, WalkMe employees have leveraged these ShoutOuts for critical updates, interacting with critical notifications with 3x more than average.
Expect an influx of new and different support challenges
Since moving to a WFH environment, our internal support teams have experienced a surge of new support challenges. Though we’ve always made on-demand support available through WalkMe, we’ve had to update and expand those offerings in an instant to meet new needs.
WalkMe Workstation – a centralized communication hub directly on your desktop – allows employees to launch in-app guidance, search support resources, or find other employees. In the days following stay-at-home orders at WalkMe, these were the top 4 search terms:
- Corona
- VPN / Need VPN
- Ticket
- IT
Since working from home, team members have accessed help resources in Workstation an average of 11.4 times per month compared to a normal 5.9. Viewed another way, that’s once every other workday, compared to once every four workdays.
Disruption shouldn’t slow transformation
Like many organizations, we were in the midst of a number of strategic initiatives when disruption hit. Specifically, our internal services teams were moving to a new management platform, scheduled to launch the same week that countries around the instituted stay-at-home orders.
Using WalkMe, we didn’t miss a beat.
Ensuring that the platform migration didn’t cause any further disruption to the day-to-day challenges of internal teams was of critical importance, so our internal teams quickly adapted to a more phased rollout structure, adding new features and processes every 3 days, and created additional WalkMe guidance to simplify the change. Check out a few of the changes that worked best:
- Include both proactive guidance and reactive help
- Suggest personalized recommendations for process improvement
- Match process change to each phase of the customer journey to organize training
Understand and monitor business productivity
As WalkMe prepared to send hundreds of employees into a full-time remote work environment, it was critical to understand how our systems and tools were supporting the business needs of our teams.
In March 2020, WalkMe launched the new Business Productivity Dashboard specifically to meet this need, adding an in-depth view into software usage across teams, processes, and applications, and allowing us to streamline software spend by uncovering unused software licenses and duplicate systems.
In the first week, we were able to cut an application for 800 users when we discovered it wasn’t being widely used.
Be empathetic about the work-home balance
Lastly, we’ve learned to be empathetic. In any time of great change or uncertainty, work and home life can both be impacted in different ways. One of the best things we’ve learned during this time is to listen to and understand the varying needs of our employees. Whether it’s sorting out a new home office, taking care of a loved one, or learning to teach school from home, everyone’s “day to day” has changed.
We’ve used WalkMe to promote a series of helpful tips, mental health resources, virtual exercise classes, and more to help support our teams.
Business Continuity has undergone a makeover in terms of priorities due to COVID-19. Organizations can come out of the crisis and into the Next Normal in a state of strength, agility, and preparedness, with the right strategy, technology, and talent.
