How to Use Guru to Transition to Remote Work
We know that with the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a massive, sudden shift to remote work. As with any sudden change, there are a lot of moving pieces — and a lot of questions. It’s critical for both the well-being of your employees and the continuity of your business to reduce confusion. Here's how Guru can help.
1. To transition to remote work immediately, use Guru to relay trusted information on the change, including:
- When the transition will begin
- How long it is expected to last
- What employees need to know about the larger event
- How they should expect to structure their days
- When to expect updates
If put in a long document, email or @ channel mention, this information can get buried and may be difficult to find and verify as up-to-date, and a crisis transition is not the time for rumor, confusion, noise, or endless scrolling. Guru Cards show their trust status at the very top, so there can be no room for misinterpretation.
Point everyone to the Guru Cards as the single source of truth, pull them up in Slack when questions are asked, and use the browser extension to make them accessible from anywhere.
Remember, this is a scary time for everyone, and rumors fly fast — especially when people aren’t in the same place to easily set the record straight. Trust is essential in a fast-moving work transition driven by crisis.
Give Guru a whirl.
2. How to structure your knowledge
Be as brief as possible. Every Card should tackle a specific subject or theme. Think bite-size. You want to reduce the amount of time it takes for the reader to find the answer they’re looking for, and increase the speed at which they understand it.
- Instead of one long FAQ covering every subject, create one Card for travel information, one for timing, one for office cleaning
- If you’re sending out email communications, capture them in Guru as well so you can refer to them and maintain an easy-to-find log of what has been shared and when. This way, if things do get buried in or deleted from an inbox, you have an alternate place to point to, as well as making them easily shareable in Slack. Learn more about how Guru integrates with Slack to streamline the sharing process.
- Change your verification cadence. The default is 3 months, but you may want to update certain cards more frequently.
- Choose the correct subject matter expert (SME) in charge of verification. In a fast-moving work transition, we recommend having one verifier to own related knowledge. That way, if individuals have immediate questions, they can comment on the Card to have the question go to the SME directly.
- Link your Cards together.
Additionally, in remote work, your best bet is to over-communicate. Knowledge that might normally be passed by word of mouth will not be. Even if it’s something informal (“The best way to respond to a customer question today”) Guru can handle it — in fact, it’s how we share informal knowledge internally ourselves.
3. How to alert people to changes in critical information
If instructions change, use Guru's announcements feature to push the update to users, as well as track who has, and hasn’t read it. Follow up with those who haven’t to make sure the new information makes its way to them.
One of the obvious challenges of having a large team that works remotely is to keep content up-to-date and make sure any changes are shared with the appropriate audience. Announcements is one of the features in Guru that I rely on to help me do that. Whether it is to advise our staff of a new internal process or procedure, or to communicate something external and more global, writing up a quick, informative card and sending it via an announcement assures me that the appropriate audience will be informed quickly and non-intrusively.— Bonnie Lynne Smith, Curriculum and Learning Analyst, Trilogy Education Services
💡Hint: Have different instructions for different teams or geographies? You can push instructions to specific groups based on need.
The future of work is remote.
Find out why knowledge management is critical.
4. Keep the information trusted
In remote environments, trust and communication are critical. Even if teams and individuals can find the knowledge they need to navigate a big (or small!) change, if they can’t trust it, they’ll end up asking teammates anyway. That’s where misunderstandings can come into the picture, complicating efforts to maintain calm and efficiency. It’s incredibly easy to verify a card. Here’s how you do it:
5. Use Guru's Remote Work templates
Guru has created ready-made remote work Card templates contained in an importable framework. Learn what's included here, then discover how to import a collection framework.
6. Pair the rollout of Guru with a remote town hall to talk about:
- Why reliance on a single-source of truth is essential during a crisis
- How you’re using trust to navigate confusion and fear as a company
- How Guru works
Want to find out how Guru can help your team make the transition to remote work? Reach out to us here.
