Sales & Marketing Collaboration Training Literacy Guide

Literary Guide: Training methods for the adoption of collaboration software in the Professional Services Marketing and Sales Department

Population: Adult Learners

Employees of a Professional Services Marketing & Sales Department

This department consists of a mix of employees who are 100% remote and others who work in the home office but travel on a regular basis.  

As part of their work load employees in the Marketing & Sales department are required to conduct training's, seminars with vendors and at trade shows.  In addition the staff supports a company web site and hires vendors who create content for their web site.

Background: Each employee is issued a company computer with remote access software which allows them to access the company network.  When traveling each employee is required to log into the software to access company e-mail and servers.

Challenges:  Access to the company software has been a challenge remotely.  Employees have had the inability to obtain documents needed to conduct training's on a timely basis which has resulted in inefficiencies.

Employees who support the web site have been unable to access files for review and approval, which has resulted in delays in content and budget ramifications when working with vendors.

Skills to be achieved:

Understanding the collaborative work model and why it’s necessary and how it can save time.  

Assumptions: Employees in this department are digitally literate.  Each employee is comfortable with the internet and accessing web sites.  

Challenges: Employees need to become comfortable with the collaborative environment online and how to use it and its differences between the company file saving on companywide servers.

Goals: The goal of this literacy guide is to teach collaborative environments to office staff.  The end goal is to have a fully collaborative environment on the cloud instead of the current method of saving information on company servers which require access to company’s remote software successfully installed and working on each person’s machine.  

Training Methods to achieve learning goal:

• Department specific iMovie’s made specifically for this department
• Web ex seminars
• Written guide with documentation which contains specifics regarding the departments collaboration goals  
• Recommend employees subscribe to https://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleDocsCommunity  & http://blog.clarity.fm/best-collaboration-tools-for-working-with-remote-teams/
• Department Blog will include the collaboration tool guide, collaboration documentation and all videos which pertain to the collaborative environment.  Employees will need to access the blog via user name and password.  Blog will be updated frequently to keep employees up to date on the latest collaborative office tools and tips and techniques
• Employee Buy in: Get employees excited about using collaborative software
• Internal Public Relations campaign for home staff, flyers posted around office reminding staff that collaboration is best.  Make collaboration fun through contests and games where employees who start collaborating win prizes such as starbucks gifts cards, company cafeteria bucks or free pizza lunch
• Department Managers will be requested to explain the benefits to employees in staff meeting and web ex conference calls

Grace period: There will be a grace period which will allow employees to still access company servers, once sufficient training has been conducted employees will be informed that collaboration is the new department objective and remote access will only have access to company e-mail and specific servers.

I choose to include various participatory methods such as  you tube videos, web ex conferences, and a department blog for the employees to train for the implementation of the collaboration model.  Each employee will be offered the same sources and be asked to login for training together as a group to participate together,  In addition they will be asked to help and assist each other when they have questions or comments regarding the implementation.  Henry Jenkins explains this type of participation as building a community and establishing a "community" type atmosphere within the department that will lead to less refusal and more acceptance to the new methods.