If you have had the opportunity to attend strategy meetings, you will well know the countless occasions when processes are discussed: how the organization would be a gem if processes existed, how we would eliminate inefficiencies if we followed the processes, the importance of documenting the processes of formal way, following some system.
The reality is that many organizations spend amounts of hours of work, money and, above all, paper, documenting processes, all to end up immersed in a sea of documents that is only dusted when some external auditor arrives that we must impress, at that time the prominence is given to the areas of standardization, however, once the auditor is dismissed, the processes are archived again and standardization is once again a supporting actor in business operations.
The saddest thing is that the result of a process-lifting exercise demands an enormous amount of effort on the part of those who lead the process and their actors, and sometimes the documentation generated is invaluable, however it is lost or lost. Archives for lack of understanding and to a greater extent due to the density of the material, flow charts are not exactly the type of light reading that a person would like to take on the road or read in their spare time.
Virtualize processes?
For some years now, the business world has been discovering something that children under 15 know very well: “what is fun, attracts; what is boring sets aside ”, this very simple concept that for some reason we forget when we reached puberty has been revived by the hand of the“ gamification ”theory which incorporates elements of video games into business situations to modify behaviors, recently coursera, launched a course on the subject taught by Professor Werbach.
Although we are not going to go into detail on the subject of gamification, its tendency does suggest something to us: would it not be an advance if the product of a process survey was something easier for ordinary mortals to digest? The answer seems to be clear: YES.
Virtual education following best practices is the most effective means of complementing the formal documentation of the processes and making their review a dynamic, understandable and above all enjoyable task.
The possibility that an employee who is not familiar with the processes, instead of having to receive a single training that they will probably forget in a few days, has a virtual corporate training university with videos, digital content and tutorials that they can access whenever required, it triggers the slopes of learning curves, dramatically reduces the room for error, and enables enormous distances to be advanced towards the standardization of processes in an organization.
Are organizations ready to create premium content?
Probably not, but content creation is not nuclear physics, recently coursera announced a Georgia Tech course covering precisely best practices for doing so, and wedubox.com launched its platform in 2012 with the specific guideline to make the job of creating courses and free delivery of a creation course, the key is that any individual be able to create.
The important thing is that once the understanding phase of the model is passed, the corporate university acquires an impressive dynamism and a life of its own, sales managers who spend too much time advising clients, can create knowledge routes that their clients will be free to consult the times that they require, freeing up support time to be able to dedicate it to the closing of new accounts and opening of markets, also technical support areas can convert solutions to claims into training modules, making problem solving a replicable topic without incurring travel and other expenses.
A call for globalization
Artificial barriers to trade tend to disappear, more free trade agreements are signed every year; competitiveness and rapid reaction capacity are no longer optional, a company must deploy new operations in jurisdictions that provide it with competitive advantages derived from new conditions, that implies training, hiring and splicing of cultures. Not infrequently, individuals who concentrate knowledge must move and dedicate enormous amounts of time to the training of new collaborators, leaving aside their daily work, sometimes moving from their workplace for long periods, the most serious thing is that for Every significant addition of staff this exercise is repeated, and who is trained has only one chance to receive the knowledge.In start-ups in new geographies, this limitation has very serious implications, since access to the “owners” of know-how is limited, just as the operations that must “lend” to their talented operators, see their productivity affected, aggravating the problem..
Thus, the scope is infinite, start by asking yourself how many process papers remain stored without being consulted for more than a year, start there, which of those processes are generating problems due to their lack of dissemination? Once the organization acquires a Dynamic university culture will take on a life of its own, its learning curves will skyrocket, the room for error narrows dramatically, and its organization will reach levels of standardization never dreamed of.
