The COVID-19 coronavirus is having a huge impact on people and organisations. With so many things that could be about to change, how should technical communicators respond?
In this episode of the Cherryleaf Podcast we look at:
- How organisations might change during and after the Covid-19 lockdown
- What that means for technical communication
- Comments made by others on LinkedIn
- What changes we’ve made at Cherryleaf
Auto-generated transcript:
This is the Cherryleaf Podcast hello and
welcome to the Cherryleaf Podcast in this
episode we’re going to look at Covid-19
the coronavirus and what it might mean
for the future of organizations and for
the future of technical communication my
name is Ellis Pratt I’m one of the
directors and Cherryleaf what we’re going
to look at is how organisations might
change during and after the lockdown
what that means or might mean for
technical communication some feedback
and comments from others about this
topic and a little bit about how it is
changing some of the things that we do
so we’re not going to cover
issues around individuals who may have
been furloughed or laid off so in this
we are going to be looking at outcomes
some of which could be positive and some
of which that could be negative and
there has been some feedback saying, do
you really want to go there? and perhaps
this is rather a worrisome topic to
investigate or to discuss well I hope
that isn’t the case the Germans have a
word called Sachlich which means to
be objective to be frank sure and that’s
our objective our goal here the things
that we’re going to describe are
possible outcomes so we’re going to make
an assumption and that is that Covid-19, the coronavirus won’t be
eradicated immediately that it’s going
to affect the world effect asks for at
least six months until hopefully we can
get to the point where there’ll be a
vaccine that will be available to
everyone so let’s start by looking at
some of the impact that coronavirus has
had and will have or might have on
organizations this is a time when there
are fundamental changes to organizations
there was an interesting podcast I
listened to by Donald Miller about how
business models will change that we’re
in a situation where we’re experiencing
10 years of history in 10 weeks and that
there are opportunities for some
organizations we’ve seen with Zoom for
example how an organization can make
rapid changes in the amount of market
share and sales that they can make at a
time like this
and so for some organizations where they
see opportunities there’s an opportunity
to stake a claim to become the leader in
a particular market sector to act
quickly and seize those opportunities
for some companies it will be a case of
prioritizing cash and cash flow over
profits that there will be a focus on
realigning the operational side of
things so it is as efficient as possible
and as good as possible
at this moment in time we talked about
leadership and communication in episode
82 and it may be during this time that
there needs to be consideration as to
whether the tone that you use in your
communication needs to change where the
readers the audience are nervous and
uncertain there’ll be a preference for
clear authoritative trustworthy
information so funny content
light-hearted content may not be the
appropriate tone at this time people
will favour information provided by
experts organizations that are seen to
be competent and trustworthy and there
may be a desire from the audience to
understand what’s happening to make
sense and meaning of it all and normally
we can predict the future by knowing
past actions and by what we do today
having a predictable effect in the
future in this current environment that
may not be true and people may want
assurance that the direction the clear
intent the goals of what an organization
wants and the motive as to why it’s
important to do something in a
particular way may need to be explained
in a clearer way so that the audience
can understand the future direction by
doing certain actions now it will lead
to certain events happening in the
future what we’ve seen from governments
in the UK and the USA and elsewhere has
been big projects rapidly thrown
together to deal with the crisis to
manage the crisis for example in the USA
government relief for small businesses
and in the UK the advice on the
coronavirus that’s been posted to the
Gov.UK website for those projects
where governments are sending out money
in particular to organisations and to
people there has been some teething
troubles some confusion particularly
with the small business relief scheme in
the USA and a need for clear policies to
enable organizations to adopt these
projects quickly and rapidly so that
these small businesses for example can
get the money quickly and importantly
for those clear policies to exist so
that the organisation’s hoping these
small companies get these loans for
example for banks know who is able to
make a claim and who is not able to make
a claim there has been a need for clear
policies and for clear communications so
one of the biggest impacts of the virus
is the potential for people
to catch it and the consequence of that
is that team members staff may not be
working all the time they may be absent
from work because of them catching it
and having to recover from the virus so
there may be an impact on the ability to
provide a continuous service within
departments or by organization to
customers so people may need to take
sick leave to recover from the corona
virus they might need to take sick leave
to support relatives that catch the
virus and unfortunately there’s a
estimated mortality rate of three
percent and that’s also a consideration
that may impact on organizations as well
hopefully that will happen to as few
people as possible so there is this big
issue within organizations of ensuring
continuity of service on LinkedIn Paul
Ballard who runs a technical writing
company in the UK posted some thoughts
about this aspect and he said that there
was an article in The Economist that
provided some evidence to his company’s
analysis that companies are needing to
get creative about how to replace once
reliable customer contact centres and he
wrote that enabling self-service online
with easy to find information is part of
the solution and that would lead to a
growth in delivering clear content and
information portals let me read out some
extracts from this article in The
Economist it was called “Please hold” call
centres are overwhelmed understaffed and
overhauling how they work good luck
trying to get in touch with a company
these days those calling British Airways
about a refund will find themselves hung
up on an automated system immediately
after they hear the words “we appreciate
your understanding at this time” Virgin
Media
emailed its cable and broadband
customers to ask the
to avoid calling banks insurance
companies and this newspaper have issued
similar requests to customers seeking
support directing them online instead
while cool numbers have shot through the
roof
call centres are closing coronavirus has
put the industry which employs some 1.3
million Britons or about 4% of the
workforce in a particularly tight spot
only 10 to 20 percent of call centre
employees typically work from home
Riggins and Maurice Tank of CCMA an
industry body many call centres take
payments making home working risky from
a legal perspective yet if an on-site
employee catches coronavirus hundreds
more may be taken offline at least for a
while
one Sky call centre in Cardiff was closed
for a day after one worker was diagnosed
with it in March other operators are
reconfiguring their processes often
overnight Serco a big contractor for the
public sector has moved more than 1/3 of
its call centre workers to home working
a census a Scottish firm with 1200
employees in Britain had 210 such
positions last month ago now 600
employees work from home Miss Thang says
several insurance firms she has spoken
to are preparing for 100% home-based
call centres even if it means providing
fewer services over the phone they are
having to make the choice to give no
service or do we give some service she
says the future of the industry is on
the line
so we’re likely to see a move away from
live support lines to more self-service
self-support knowledge-based systems
where customers can find the answers for
themselves rather than having to call a
support line and that we are likely to
see more of people’s knowledge that’s
currently in their heads documented so
if they’re unavailable to work that
people have information they can refer
to too
continue doing that work without them
being there another change that we’re
likely to see is more people working
from home and the proof that it is
possible even when people are trying to
juggle working from home with other
House members also doing the same and
home-schooling and the like that it is
possible for more people to work from
home than have done prior to the
outbreak of the corona virus a
consequence of that may be that if it’s
possible for somebody to work from home
in London equally is possible to engage
somebody who could work from home in
Bangalore or Bogota or somewhere else
however the opposite could also happen
that there’s a desire to move away from
having a globalized supply chain and to
bring it closer in to have it more local
and therefore there may be a desire to
have people who are working from home
but within the country that the
organization is operating in and that
can also have other benefits like
everybody being on the same timezone so
there may be a move towards having
people working from home but close still
to the organization we’ll have to see
which way it goes on that it’s not easy
to onboard and train new staff if
they’re not in an office obviously it’s
a lot easier for them to find the
toilets in the kitchen but actually
onboarding and understanding the systems
can be trickier when you don’t have the
opportunity for being guided through
that information by somebody so that may
lead to more onboarding information
being documented so that people can
onboard themselves it may also mean that
there is more e-learning based onboarding rather than once one or
classroom sessions another aspect of
working of home mentioned in The
Economist article is the issue of cybersecurity
so there are limitations to certain areas
where people can or can’t work from home
so what other changes have we seen are
we likely to see with a lockdown for
some countries we’re seeing they return to work and that that
is being phased in for certain types of
shops or certain types of industries and
it may also be the case that people who
are of a certain age perhaps under 30 or
those that have had the virus and have
established some antibodies against it
are allowed to go back to work before
others a downside of that may be that
certain groups are discriminated against
unfairly we have also seen changes with
training, training in a classroom at the
moment is no longer possible and so what
that’s led to has been adaptation of
classroom courses so they can be
delivered over platforms such as
Microsoft Teams GoToMeeting Zoom Jitsi
Skype and the like and that training
split rather than being a solid 9 to 5
or 9 to 4:30 block of time that that
live training split into sessions of
perhaps two or three hours delivered
over a series of days and for some
courses it may be that it makes sense to
deliver it as recorded e-learning videos
rather than lined sessions all two did a
hybrid between recorded training and
then have maybe office hours when
students can ask the trainer any
particular questions or there are
exercises that people do having done
some pre-course learning
another obvious one has been with
conferences and with the lockdown it’s
no longer possible to run face-to-face
conferences so we’ve seen a number of
conferences switched to being online so
that you can view the conference view
the speakers remotely and this may
become a more permanent feature it may
be that conferences are a hybrid of both
in attendance type offering and also the
ability to view and attend remotely
however there may be some limitations to
this in terms of time zones in that some
people may be flowing in to attend a
conference because they want to
acclimatize the timezone that if they
were in their own local country they may
have to stay up until maybe 3:00 or 4:00
in the morning okay so let’s move on to
what does this mean
for technical communicators from what
we’ve seen in the more general scheme of
things for organizations there’s likely
to be more knowledge wisdom information
policies procedures documented rather
than it being left in people’s brains
so more policies and procedures more
knowledge portals more content into
knowledge portals as well and in this
environment where people may not be
clear what they should do where there
may be some confusion that there will be
a need to make sure that things are
clear and that things are communicated
quickly and clearly to customers
stakeholders or internally to staff so
time to market the ability to create
content and to get it published quickly
will be important so how efficient you
are able to publish your tool chain will
be one factor
and it could be an opportunity for
technical communicators to lead to take
the initiative by creating some proof of
concepts to show to people about how
information can be communicated and
resolve some of the issues they may be
facing so what types of proof of
concepts could you be developing well
one might be to create some process
flowcharts some big picture type
information that helps people access and
find existing content that might be
buried in a massive loosely structured
hard to find information so one approach
could be to use a tool like Visio or
Draw.IO and create process flow
charts with hotspots for people to
navigate you could create templates for
people to use if they are writing
policies and procedures or documenting
things so it’s easier and faster for
them to create good consistent content
you could offer an editing service to
review and improve content that your
team members are creating moving on from
that we’ve talked about that there could
be an opportunity to create self-support
Help systems for people to build or
create or extend knowledge bases so
there’s things that you could do in that
environment you could create a simple
process where people can create content
in tools that they’re familiar with
today like Word and to ingest them to
take them into tools like Flare or offer to
help to restructure them and generate
HTML websites or portals from those
particular tools or you could set up a
simple installation of a web-based tool
like Confluence or Notion and we talked
about Notion in the podcast episode with
Jen Lambourne you could create some video
walkthroughs to explain common tasks or
offer yourself as a resource
to support department or other
departments to create simple
walkthroughs on how to do certain
actions beating the accounts department
or some other department or develop the
walk me type of videos that can be
connected to an application itself shows
you where to go within particular
screens within an application if time is
available there may be scoped for using
metadata to tag information to make it
easier for other tools to filter and
link data together so those may be
opportunities where you can create a
little proof of concept or a pilot show
people something that’s concrete that
they can grasp and see that can benefit
them benefit the organization and for
the content itself that will be on these
self-service support systems in your
help content it may be a good time to
liaise with the support line staff look
at the analytics and see what are the
common questions that are going to the
support team and saying whether that
content has been documented so that
customers have an alternative route to
phoning the support line and that that
information is easy for customers to
find we posted some messages on Social
Media saying we were going to be looking
at this topic on one of our episodes of
the Cherryleaf podcast and asking people to
share their thoughts on this and we had
a number of responses from different
people particularly on LinkedIn so what
I’d like to do is just read out some of
the comments
so Liz Gregory
said I’ve been blown
away by the number of emails I’ve had
from companies imploring me to use their
online Help rather than calling them
Sarah Feldman who was on one of our
recent episodes on the podcast said
perhaps there’ll be an increased demand
for technical communication that enables
distributed or remote workforces to
perform
James Hansen a content development and
migration experts said self-service help
platforms would require well-organized
and indexed basis of knowledge which is
something I’ve been dreaming about for
as long as I can remember
imagine if users could find answers to
90% of their questions without agent
assistance
Amanda Lindsey director & pre-launch
technical author said one trend I’m
seeing now is the requirement for
documentation of better documentation
about remote payments as small
businesses such as restaurants switch to
a takeout delivery model to
survive this includes the security
aspects around a remote payment where
the cardholder isn’t present
cybersecurity is of course always
important but sadly we’re seeing an
increase in our tanks especially
phishing scams so there’s a need for
comms around that Florimond Alemps
in
France who has a job title Responsable de projets says many individuals
leave companies every day since baby
boom when things were slower many
employees learnt tons of things as they
quit their job voluntarily or not
because they retire because they want to
change context companies various
knowledge companies get some results
brackets files with a few clues on what
led to them
whenever can get higher changes might go
faster some can temporarily experienced
or anticipated it’s more than time to
get told to manage knowledge differently
for those using a software-as-a-service
application are more resilient less
dependent from geography local or global
more collaborative and scalable for sure
desktop is dead who is ready for the
worst is comfortable in normality
technical writers should focus on
knowledge or immaterial assets of
companies not on the font of headers and
footers delegating to a platform the
knowledge of a company is a choice
Suzanne Marshall
said
I’m finding that off
your teams are referencing the knowledge
centre I’ve created to create better
documentation and are much happier
contributing to make the guidance better
than they seem to be before Covid-19
Tanja Lorber senior technical editor of
Stegman systems said with so many people
working from home virtual training and
the processes around these trainings
will also be impacted in my opinion
getting started with a software when you
don’t have colleagues around you to
guide you is definitely something we
have to consider as a use case and John
Mowat wrote many organizations and
businesses are anxious to get back to
in-person interaction there will be many
who realized benefits by pivoting
towards self-serve computer augmented
offerings and will continue to build on
those into the future and on LinkedIn he
provided a link to an article he’d
written about chatbots and their
application within the retail sector
Larry Kunz wrote will probably never
return to the old paradigm of co-workers
located in the same office space
interacting in meeting rooms and less
formally in the break area or on the
patio
those interactions have long been away
for technical communicators to build
collegial relationships both with each
other and with a subject matter experts
now will need to find new ways to assert
ourselves demonstrate our value and earn
at least in the eyes of the SMEs our
place at the table the introverts among
us
it could be daunting fortunately many of
us already work with remote teams often
in different countries and time zones
we’ve learnt skills for building and
sustaining those working relationships
without sharing the same physical space
now we’ll need to apply those skills
more often and more intentionally and in
tcworld magazine Corinna Melville
wrote the coronavirus will neither
exterminate humankind nor permanently
stamp out our most characteristic traits
our yearn to travel and explore every
corner of our planet our drive to
advance the technologies we have
developed and above all our desire to
socialize and engage with each other
face to face not just app to app there
is no VR headset that can even remotely
replace the beauty of the real world
there is no artificial intelligence that
can substitute the face-to-face
conversation with her childhood friend
Anita Dekanic wrote working from home
provides you with an opportunity to be
creative and develop new approaches and
new solutions for your daily life as
well as for your work Smita Menon a
Content
architect said Covid has highlighted
how remotes working infrastructure is
sadly not optimal and the lack of
digital and automated processes to
ensure complete BCP -being I presume business continuity
planning but we can look forward to
organizations learning from their
shortcomings and implementing remote
working as not just an interim measure
but a long-term enablement strategy this
will increase the demand for techies IT
experts and technical communicators or
communication across digital channels
social media and messaging platforms is
at its peak due to social distancing and
lockdown precautions the post lockdown
period will also ensure that
communicators are kept busy after all
while all organizations and businesses
try to rush back to full scale
operations and efficiency can the
experts who showcase this to the world
at large through their writings be left
behind Colum McAndrew wrote one question
I’m hearing more and more is do we need
to be office based although this isn’t a
question directly related to technical
communications it is an interesting one
perhaps it applies to tech firms more
than other verticals but this pandemic
has Illustrated that it is possible to
work from home with some planning and
thought and Mario Chavez wrote there are
types of knowledge that are very
difficult to document like the so called
tribal knowledge or knowledge that
consists of habits personal and
collectivised experience and wisdom
brackets although some people keep
confusing experience with wisdom and
artists and knowledge just like the Open
Office fad can actually be a good
solution for some teams and some
companies working from home works
wonders if we recognize it is not a
panacea or a universal technology-based
solution we are human beings we crave
physical and emotional contact
perhaps different kinds of working from
home can evolve from this pandemic
experience and Craig Wright wrote I hope
it has opened up some organizations eyes
to the reality of home working I have
worked from home for years without any
problems
communicating with others so I said I’d
mention some of the things that are
happening at Cherryleaf like all
organizations we’re having to adapt also
project work is still continuing and
we’ve seen an upturn on the training
side of things but we’re still needing
to make changes and adapt the types of
things that we’re doing for the
classroom courses that we offer we now
are able to offer those over the
internet with a live trainer using tools
like Microsoft Teams for the e-learning
courses we’ve as I’ve mentioned on a
previous podcast episode we’ve been
asked to make it possible for
organizations to make group bookings for
their staff so they can take the courses
and we’ve done that and we’ve had a
number of organizations booked up their
staff for different courses we’ve made
some changes to websites and offerings
relating to policies and procedures and
we’ve added on to that page a quiz a
policies and procedures readiness quiz
that people can take and in terms of the
future one of the things that we need to
do that’s clear from the feedback that
people have said about the opportunity
to push the idea of self-service
information to help deal with the issue
of shortages of staff on support lines
that’s something that we need to push
and promoters and offering or solution
to that particular problem so most of
the changes relate to marketing and the
way in which we deliver training the
mechanism by which we do project writing
services and recruitment they have
stayed or are staying at the moment
essentially the same
so what do you think we’ve looked at
quite a bit there in terms of the
implications and effects of the coronavirus how it’s affecting organizations
in general and some aspects in terms of
telecommunications opportunities for us
to work you can share your thoughts by
contacting us via info at Cherryleaf.com
or you can add your comments to the
threads that we’ve posted onto LinkedIn
if you look for my name
Ellis Pratt you should see the chat the
discussion that’s been going on with
different people commenting so again
thank you for listening
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