A large part of an employee's workday consists of searching for and compiling information about their work tasks. Studies show that an employee, regardless of industry, spends almost two days a week just looking for information. How to prevent this?
The reason why so much time is spent looking for information may be due to a complicated intranet where it is difficult to find what you are looking for. It may also be because different departments and knowledge owners think differently about their instructions or routine descriptions and in what format these should be produced. Some create PDFs, others Word documents, and some may prefer to record their screen.
There is thus a lack of an internally decided standard for how instructions are created or in what way these should be available. Unfortunately, this gives the employees poor conditions for managing their work, which can lead to more cases for support and calls to knowledge owners. It can also create dissatisfaction among the employees as they do not know where help is when it is needed.
Offering employees self-help portals as a natural landing place for questions creates good conditions for a more autonomous organization. With different levels in the portals, the information can also be divided so that an employee, with a few clicks, can find information or knowledge about a specific subject.
We want to highlight an example from our client Värnamo Municipality, which, in its project "Everyone on track", decided to use Guideportal, a type of search page in InfoCaption, to make it easier for everyone in the organization to get help they need. The portal was created by Mikael Stenström, project manager, and Therese Thimberg, IT educator at Campus Värnamo.
The guide portals use "widgets", which, among other things, provide the possibility to create buttons for sub-portals about different areas. It is also possible to quickly highlight the guides in top lists, show recommended guides, and much more.
The guide portal of Värnamo, where employees can find help during their workday.
Mikael explains how they were thinking:
"In May 2018, Värnamo municipality's digital project "Everyone onboard" was launched. Part of the project was to take over the responsibility for InfoCaption and evaluate it. The system had been used sparingly in the years before the project. Work began with creating digital manuals with knowledge tests for The Office package based on InfoCaption's ready-made guides. The idea for the manuals was for them to function as a complement to traditional training efforts, but they are working just as well for self-study.
To present the manuals in a simple way, we created a portal. The existing guides for other systems lacked a good structure, making them difficult to find. It started with an Office portal but has grown to become a more extensive guide portal. The guide portal is still very new to us but has received a positive response, and the demand for guides in more systems has increased."
We at InfoCaption think this is one of many good examples of a helpful portal that makes it easy to find the knowledge or information you are looking for to get ahead in your work.
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