Monday, August 07, 2006
Pimp your staff workflows!
No matter how cool you think technology is, you’re toast if you can’t get your staff to buy into technology (unless you’re a one-person library). Nothing spells frustration more than a gung-ho library director with all sorts of neat ideas on how to use technology, who has a staff still insistent on chiseling spine labels on stone tablets.
So how can you get your staff more invested in technology? First, take the time to listen to them. Sit down with them and use your systems analysis skills to find out where the staff thinks bottlenecks in their workflows are – not necessarily where YOU think the bottlenecks are.
If you can use technology to solve some of the problems that your staff perceives, and make their lives easier, they will slowly learn that technological change is not always awful and scary.
One example of this: I learned that our automation software was making it difficult for our staff to print the information they needed. Sure, I could have tried to explain to the staff that they could use the PrintScreen key and then paste the screen into WordPad and print it from there, but that would only have increased their trauma. I needed to find an easier solution. So I went to Tucows and looked up “free screen printing software.” There, I found PrintDeskTop, a small program that makes it really easy to quickly print out whatever is on the screen. The staff was delighted! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 1:48 PM
So how can you get your staff more invested in technology? First, take the time to listen to them. Sit down with them and use your systems analysis skills to find out where the staff thinks bottlenecks in their workflows are – not necessarily where YOU think the bottlenecks are.
If you can use technology to solve some of the problems that your staff perceives, and make their lives easier, they will slowly learn that technological change is not always awful and scary.
One example of this: I learned that our automation software was making it difficult for our staff to print the information they needed. Sure, I could have tried to explain to the staff that they could use the PrintScreen key and then paste the screen into WordPad and print it from there, but that would only have increased their trauma. I needed to find an easier solution. So I went to Tucows and looked up “free screen printing software.” There, I found PrintDeskTop, a small program that makes it really easy to quickly print out whatever is on the screen. The staff was delighted! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 1:48 PM
