Why Training Needs to Be a Team Activity

At UpRaise, we are starting a series of guest posts from world renowned Atlassian Experts. This, the first one, comes from Clearvision.

Teamwork is the key to success

Atlassian, the team behind JIRA, recently revealed that the #1 contributor to workplace happiness is the sense of belonging to a team. 75% of job success, the same study showed, is how you connect to other people.

Teamwork is key to success. But those teams need to learn all about the right tools, processes and workflows to work truly efficiently – and all too often, that can be looked at on an individual basis. There may be occasions where an individual needs specific training that is not applicable to the rest of the team, but as a general rule, you should be looking at your onboarding, training and general learning activities as a team effort.

All about consistency

The subject of consistency is particularly relevant when it comes to onboarding and training new team members, though it still applies to more general learning across entire teams.

Inconsistency is the enemy of efficiency. Inconsistent learning processes will waste time and money, and produce discord among your teams.

Think back to when you first joined your team, for example. How many times did you ask other members of the team questions? When you’re new and uncertain, this is normal, and if you encourage a culture of learning and collaboration, asking questions should never be a problem.

It’s when multiple people ask the same questions on multiple occasions that it starts taking up a lot of time. But instead of discouraging questions, take note of the patterns and adapt your onboarding and training material accordingly.

Document and learn

To achieve consistency, it’s important to document your learning processes. Try a company wiki like Confluence to complement JIRA and promote visibility.

This way, you’ll be able to make sure that each new member of a team goes over the same topics and learning points. Everyone will be brought up to speed together, and while questions are inevitable – and good! – those repetitive queries will decrease in number and frequency. What’s more, tools like Confluence offer a “Questions” functionality, which essentially acts as an interactive, improved and ever-growing self-service FAQ area for your teams.

Perhaps most importantly, you need to be able to adapt your training as well. Listen to your team. Encourage them to submit their feedback: do they keep teaching new colleagues the same lessons? Is there a particularly tricky aspect of a piece of software, or an unclear part of your workflows that can either be tweaked or explained more thoroughly?

Your teams aren’t the only ones learning. You, as a business, can learn just as much by collaborating across the organisation. When you incorporate this feedback and adapt, you’ll find your learning processes and teamwork will continuously grow, improve, and become more efficient.

How do your teams learn?

Every team has a different learning style. Take our quiz to find out if your team’s learning is “survival of the fittest” or if you risk being left behind!

 Chelsey is Content Manager for Clearvision.
She writes about agile methodologies, software development, and collaboration and culture in the tech industry. Chelsey is passionate about literature, the intersection of fashion and tech, and the Oxford comma. Thankfully, Chelsey writes better blog posts than she does bios.