The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/21494
LESSONSLEARNED The Best Laid Plans A number of years ago, we thought that it would be a good idea to assess the skills of secretaries at our firm and then target training to address skill gaps. HR was supportive as this tied in nicely with a program they were launching to reward secretaries for taking on extra duties and developing new skill sets. We worked with HR to establish core competencies and made sure we had training courses to support those skills. We did not want to make all secretaries attend all courses, so we decided to create assessments to allow them to test out of training they did not need. Not having much of a budget, we set out to develop the assessments in-house. We created a series of questions that would test our users’ knowledge of our software. As with many well-laid plans, things did not turn out as we anticipated. VALUABLE LESSONS WE LEARNED: It is much easier to communicate goals and initiatives early than it is to get in front of the rumor mill once it has started to churn. • Even if you call something an assessment, people still know it is a test. • Multiple choice and “HotSpot” questions are limited to one or two correct ways to answer, but with software, there may be more than one way to complete a task. • People who are forced to attend training that they do not think they need do not show up in the proper frame of mind for learning. • If you spend a little more time listening to the needs of your audience before you design a program, you are likely to develop a much more effective program. GOING DOWN THE WRONG PATH After destroying morale and having very little measurable improvement in performance to show for our efforts, a couple of secretaries approached me and calmly 124 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer explained their perceptions of the program. First, they felt singled out and picked on because the program had been targeted to secretaries only. Thanks to the rumor mill, many felt that their jobs were on the line. This also may have contributed to the fact that many were not retaining the training information beyond the assessment. They felt demoralized because they knew they were good at their jobs and if they did not score well on a topic because they accomplished a task a different way, the test did not provide an accurate assessment of their skill levels. Also, because we approached the training from the perspective that all legal secretaries should have the same skills, many felt they were being forced to attend training that was not relevant to their jobs and were being held accountable for skills they did not need to do their jobs. TURNING THE CORNER We listened. We went back to the drawing board with the valuable lessons we learned, revamped our curriculum and created KC University, a training program that served both staff and attorneys. KC University ran successfully for four years and had a staff graduation rate of 95 percent and an attorney graduation rate of 73 percent. The feedback we received was almost all positive. The attorneys learned how to work in documents without doing harm; the secretaries learned how to properly format documents with styles and auto-numbering, and everyone learned how to generate a PDF from a Word document without printing it out and walking it to a scanner. The end result was that our firm was able to really start taking advantage of all the technology that we had invested in. OUR ROADMAP The first thing we did was to form several committees. We had a steering committee that involved HR, administration, recruiting and training. We also formed separate committees comprising secretaries, attorneys, paralegals and staff. We then compiled a list of all the tasks that could be performed using our technology, and we allowed these committees to identify the tasks that they felt were important to perform the various jobs. We added a few that addressed emerging technology at the time, but for the most part we allowed our users to create the core competency requirements. The lists were then blessed by HR and the steering committee.