How do you help your team increase their capacity and efficiency?

Most of us have more to do than we can get done. There are multiple releases a year, each with new functionality that could (and should!) be leveraged. There are various changes within your company or organization that require updates to Workday. Etc. Etc.

We also have a limit to the number of staff we can hire and a limited budget to spend on outside resources.

So- How do we increase the capacity of our existing team?

You have two options

1. Decrease their work (i.e. incoming requests) and increase the speed at which they can get things done.

But how?

First- Don’t have a $100 per hour person doing $20 per hour work!
(These are USA pay rates and you may not have any $100 per hour people, but just roll with me for a bit.)

The point is- Is your team doing anything that could be delegated to a lower-cost person?

Oftentimes we have highly trained and experienced people answering general incoming tickets/emails. The logic is that these are easy questions, so they can respond to them quickly.

But are they getting the right stuff done?

The highly experienced/trained staff should be focused on the work that ONLY they can do!

Delegate the easy things (like ‘How do I enter my emergency contacts?’) to an admin staff person or entry-level person. Anything that is a basic question may also be a potential question to push back to your functional teams (such as Benefits, Expense, Payroll, etc.).

There are often admin support staff within your department that support your directors or whoever. They are usually detail-oriented and can pick up new things quickly – and much less expensive per hour than your Workday staff.

Why not have them review all the incoming requests? Give them a list of ‘copy and paste’ answers for frequent questions or go through the job aids you have created and have them point people to those. Then, they can route the more complicated questions to the higher-level team members.

Start by reviewing all the incoming requests and who is responding to them. Which of these makes sense to delegate? Ask your Workday team members what tickets/emails they are getting which could/should be delegated.

2. Increase the efficiency of your Workday team, particularly the level 2/3 team members.

Start by assessing the maturity/experience level of your team. There are two levels of this—their expertise level as individuals and how they work together as a team.

As individuals: Are they fairly new to supporting Workday? Or have they been doing it for years?

As a team: How long have they been working together? Do they work well together? Do they reach out to each other in appropriate ways to ask questions and support each other?

These impact your support team’s efficiency and what you can do to improve it.

Early on, they need ‘lifelines’ to ask quick questions so they don’t waste time. As they mature, they won’t leverage this as much. These lifelines could be an outside vendor help desk contract, or if they are new to Workday and there are others on the team with more experience, they may need permission/encouragement to ask for help from their teammates.

Also, the maturity of the team. Do they work more independently or as a team? As they trust each other more, they can bounce ideas off each other to move faster. But you can also have newer members that require more support as they get up to speed.

Leverage the resources available to them. This includes Community (previous posts, documentation, posting new questions), the Workday Support Helpdesk (for certain types of questions), and a vendor-provided Helpdesk contract if you have one.

For new people, it takes time to get comfortable with understanding these resources and knowing which one to use and when.

They also need to figure how what is an appropriate amount of time to spend on a problem before asking for help.

For me, I hate to be ‘beaten by a computer’. This means that if I’m not careful, I can spend too much time on a problem without asking for help. (For example, trying to get the data just right for an EIB to load without errors. A sample working file can help so much!). You can spend a ton of time researching something on Community or trying to figure out the right combination of calc fields for a report or integration.

For a new person, as the manager, pick an amount of time, maybe 30 or 60 minutes, and tell them that if they can’t figure it out in that amount of time, they need to ask for help. They also need to spend more than 5 minutes on a problem before they ask for help! 🙂

Provide your team with time to focus

In order to focus on a specific project, it’s important to have some quiet time to focus. If your team has assigned the task of monitoring the incoming request email/ticketing system to entry-level staff, then you should consider giving your team at least 2 hours of uninterrupted time blocks to work on the project. During this time block, they should shut down their email and activate the ‘do not disturb’ setting for everything else. It’s also helpful to have them schedule this time on their calendar.

For those who work in an office, it can be beneficial to have them move to a conference room during periods of focused work time. This would help prevent coworkers from stopping by their cubicles to chat or ask questions, which can be a major distraction, especially when working on complicated tasks like a configuration change. Interruptions can make it difficult to get back on track and remember the issues you were trying to resolve, resulting in wasted time.

Leverage Training can increase your team’s efficiency

It’s important to acknowledge that people have different learning styles. While some prefer to have access to documentation, others prefer to attend classes. Moreover, some are more linear thinkers, while others prefer to learn in a more flexible way.

If your team members haven’t undergone any training (or the training was before they knew much about Workday), I’d encourage you to have them go through official Workday training and ideally obtain Workday Pro certification. Starting with the core product training and gradually adding more training over time can be very beneficial.

This is especially helpful for individuals who have been using Workday for a while without any official training. In these cases, there will be gaps in their knowledge about the various options that a module can offer. Going through the training can help fill these gaps, enabling them to solve problems more quickly and come up with creative solutions to business challenges using Workday.

I have additional thoughts on the best ways for people to learn Workday, but that will be a topic for another day.

Look at the meetings on your calendars. Which are truly necessary?

How about you?

What have you found helpful to create or improve the capacity level of your team? Let me know by reaching out here.

If you or your team would like to discuss this more, I’d love to help you and your team grow and mature your software support model. I do one-on-one coaching to support teams and leaders of support teams. Connect with me here.

Are you interested in further training? Sign up for my intensive training session on Thursday, October 26 at 11am EST to learn Mastering Prioritization for Software Support. Sign up here.