New employee Karbon training

I am just getting started on setting up Karbon to handle our employee coaching. I am currently taking a two step approach:

1. Meta work item with high level training goals and orders
   1. I have these divided into sections like ‘General Training’ and ‘Intermediate Training’ and so on.
   2. I also include sections specific to the person’s role at the firm.
2. I then have specific work item templates for certain trainings.
   1. I have everyone go through standard Karbon training (automatically assigned when adding staff), Karbon certification (Google it to get the link to apply), and Avrio Karbon Way training (how we apply what Karbon can do to our firm)
   2. We also have everyone go through a tutorial class for Microsoft 365 and our tax prep software

Each staff member has a coach and works through their training list with their coach. The meta work item stays open for the entire career of the staff member and is constantly adjusted, though we start with a basic framework. It takes about a year or more to get through many of the standard training material, so this is a long-term approach to training and coaching.

I hope that was helpful. There’s a lot more that I can say about it, but I don’t want to go into too much detail if it’s not helpful. :)

We use an app call Tettra where we document all of our procedures. In Tettra, we have a page called How We Use Karbon that lays the groundwork for our firm’s best practices for Karbon. I think this is an important aspect in adopting any software because we’re asking team to change their behavior, which is hard.

In this document we describe how we expect things to be done and sometimes we tell them the why behind it. For example, here’s an excerpt that lays out our expectation with Triage:

When we triage email, we always:

1. Assign the email to ourselves or the appropriate team member if the email requires an action to complete.

2. Clear an email from triage without an assignment only when there is no action required.

3. Assign a to-do date.

4. Assign a due date. Be reasonable, give a couple of days. If the due date is a hard deadline, then mention it in the comment.

5. Add a detailed comment on what needs to be done.

6. Add the email to an Organizational Contact.

7. Add the email to a Work Item, if appropriate (see Work below)

Things we don't do:

1. Don't simply @-reference a team member in the email comments and assume that it is an assignment.

2. Don't assign an email and provide no context. Use the comments to tell the assignee what needs to be done.

3. Don't leave emails in Triage as a method to remember to do them.

We also are every explicit in how tasks should be titled. For example:

To-Do Title

The To-Do Title should be brief and explicit. We don't leave the assignee guessing, even if the assignee is us.

 

When creating a To-Do title, we:

 

1. Use a verb as the first word in the task.

2. Have the outcome of the To-Do in the title.

 

To-Do titles that start with nouns are vague. A To-Do title that reads:

 

• "Email the weekly A/R report to John Smith. DEADLINE 04/20/2020" is better than:

• "Email the weekly A/R report" which is better than:

• "Weekly A/R report".

i hope you find this helpful.

We use the Karbon tutorial videos and articles for the basics of how to use Karbon and navigate around.  After they complete that, they have a video conference with our on-boarding specialist.  She trains them in all the company practices such as naming conventions, tracking time, how to tag someone etc.  They do a screen share and actually create items or work on a work item. They are also given a mentor so they can ask questions as they arise.  This seems to work well for us.