Lesson
6

Onboarding & Training Your Team

8mins to complete

Training your team is one of the most important steps in successfully rolling out a new research platform. The more effective resources and enablement you can provide as an admin, the easier your job will be in the future. 

But you don’t need to figure it all out right now. In this lesson of our Hub for ReOps: Set Up and Onboarding course, we’ll give you some early context and things to consider before moving onto a full team launch of Research Hub, including:

  • How to prepare for an effective team rollout
  • Common challenges admins run into during team activation

We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in a future course on Team Activation. Sign up to be notified when new Academy Courses drop. 

📹 Prefer watching to reading? This content is available as both an article and a video. Watch our Customer Success Specialist, Kaylynn, take you through the content in the video below or keep reading to dive in!

How to prepare for an effective team rollout

Here are some of the strategies you can use to start preparing for an effective team rollout.

1. Assign a dedicated Hub “owner.” 

If you’re taking this course, you probably already identify as the “owner” or team admin for Research Hub. The dedicated owner doesn’t have to be a ReOps professional, but it makes a world of difference to designate someone to hold themselves and others accountable for successful adoption of the tool. 

2. Identify your preferred use cases and potential challenges. 

Not all teams use Research Hub in the same ways. With an understanding of your own team’s research needs and practices, start listing out all the different ways your team might use Hub, and work with your CSM to anticipate sticking points. By identifying these potential challenges early on, you can create fool-proof workflows, templates, and enablement materials to prevent them. 

3. Plan for a tiered rollout.

Our most successful teams take a tiered approach to rolling out Research Hub. As an admin, you should onboard yourself first to start learning about Hub and setting up the fundamentals, and then invite a small group of trusted partners to help you work through the kinks before finally rolling out to the rest of the team. 

4. Create strong, customized onboarding materials. 

The most effective enablement program is tailored to your company’s specific needs, demonstrates enthusiasm and benefits for the end-user, and varied enough to accommodate folks with different learning styles. For example, some teams host 1-1 or group training sessions, set up Slack channels to field questions and share tips, and regularly follow up with researchers to gauge their experience and collect success stories. 

5. Create project templates.

Creating project templates is one of the best ways to enable your team to do fast, effective research. You can create a project template by launching a project, and then clicking “mark as template” on that project on the main User Interviews project page. Anyone on your team can access these templates to get a head start on launching projects. Plan to build up a bank of project templates over time, as the diversity and frequency of your research grows. 

6. Set and track effective team goals.

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Our most successful customers work with their CSM early on to set and track key milestones (such as completing a research project by date, launching an opt-in form by date, and onboarding X group of team members by date) and metrics (such as participant response rates, project volume, and time to complete recruiting workflows). 

7. Just get started.

When you have important decisions to make about how to implement a new platform, it can be easy to succumb to analysis paralysis that prevents you from getting started. Although a ramp up period is to be expected, one of the best things you can do to set your team up for success is to start launching projects as soon as possible — that way, you can begin reaping the rewards of our seamless workflow tool ASAP and gaining the experience you need to become a UI expert. 

Common challenges in team activation

We often see admins run into the following challenges when rolling out Research Hub to the wider team: 

  • Admin oversight: When introducing their team to Research Hub, team admins often want to maintain higher levels of oversight to prevent mishaps. For example, you may want to review and approve projects before they go live, or control panel data uploads to keep your database clean. These extra steps are okay if they make you feel more comfortable, but remember that Hub’s admin features (such as invite rules and permissions) are there to help reduce the need for time-consuming oversight across multiple teams, projects, and researchers. 
  • Change management: In any company, the process of rolling out a new platform is likely to involve some internal resistance or slow adoption, and Hub is no exception. To overcome this challenge, plan on organizing multiple training sessions, automated reminders, or other tactics to repeatedly encourage your team to use Hub. It may also help to work with leadership in your research, design, and product departments to provide top-down directives to improve adoption. 
  • Finding time for training: Rolling out a new platform takes time. Some researchers may lack confidence in learning a new platform like Research Hub, while others may feel less confident in their overall research abilities. As you prepare to activate your team, plan for the additional time, attention, and bandwidth you might need to make sure everyone is on board. Plus, be sure to lean on UI’s existing documentation (like these Academy courses!) to reduce the workload of enablement. 
  • Setting and tracking team goals: Some teams may struggle to set specific, actionable goals for Hub usage. If you’re not sure where to start, your CSM will be happy to work with you to identify the goals and metrics that will work best for your team. We’ll provide some examples of milestones and metrics you might want to focus on in the next section. 

These challenges aren’t all relevant to every team, but it’s important to be aware of them so you know how to prepare and what to look out for during the rollout process. In a future course, we’ll dig deeper into team onboarding with more tips for successfully navigating this process.

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