During our last User Day, Céline Buisson, HRIS Delegate at GRTgaz, and Chloé Longuet, HRIS project manager and HR studies at GRTgaz, presented the change management approach adopted and the results obtained, 5 months after the rollout of their new TAM tool Kelio with Shortways.
Context, objectives, adopted change management methodology… a look back at this project.
Table of contents:
What was the context of your project?
Céline Buisson : In 2022, GRTgaz launched a project to replace its TAM tool, which was a specific tool of about twenty years, which had become obsolete. This project is called “COL’T” (for “Collection of Time” in French).
Among all the EGI (Electrical and Gas Industries) companies that used this historic TAM solution, GRTgaz was the first to make this change.
The challenge was important because TAM concerns all employees and payroll for a wide variety of uses, our employees are scattered throughout France and they are not all very comfortable with computing.
We therefore needed to set up a major change management process for our 3,300 users.
What were the objectives of the project?
Céline Buisson : The main objective was to lead the change and facilitate the handling to ensure that all our employees get to grips with COL’T, with the strong challenge that all the elements are entered before the end of January for the first payroll with this new tool.
Chloé Longuet : The rules and specificities in TAM can be complex and with many special cases, such as on-call duty, the objective was to integrate HR business content directly into the tutorial instructions: centralize information that is both functional, regulatory, and “technical”.
We also really wanted to encourage employee autonomy by promoting access to information directly in the tool.
We did not want them to be dependent on their HR manager for information but to benefit from full support including HR rules in the media, such as the types of on-call duty.
What change management approach/methodology was followed?
Céline Buisson : We have set up a reinforced support system from the beginning of January until the beginning of March, combining several channels and actions, so as to ensure that we reach all of our employees:
- A digital assistant,
- Communications by e-mail and on the intranet,
- Webconferences by theme with slots offered each week,
- Support / video tutorials in our LMS,
- A community of ambassadors that we have also led to relay the change.
GRTgaz turned to Shortways to integrate its digital assistant into the new tool from the go-live on January 1, 2023.
We carried it through communication and support for change made for COL’T:
We did not make a presentation dedicated to the assistant but we integrated the information about the digital assistant in the presentation of COL’T: “Here is COL’T, and in COL’T, you have an assistant to guide you” .
Chloé Longuet : A systematic presentation of Shortways was first made at the beginning of the COL’T getting started sessions, presenting it as a feature in its own right of COL’T.
We first gave the instructions for downloading the online help: the deployment of Shortways being done by browser extension, everyone had to download the extension themselves.
Then, during the presentation of COL’T functionalities, we gave usage examples of the assistant: “This course may seem complex to learn, but don’t worry, you can find the step-by-step dedicated in Shortways”.
Finally, for all the channels of exchange with employees, whether questions about our corporate social network or other, we had decided to systematically refer to the assistant to promote its use in our answers.
5 months after deployment, what adjustments have you made?
Céline Buisson : After 5 months of use, more than 50% of our employees have downloaded the Assistant extension. We feared that this download to be carried out by each employee would be a hindrance, but the figures speak for themselves: these are very encouraging usage statistics which confirm us that the tool has generally been understood and is of interest to our employees.
To sustain and improve this use rate, we continue to enrich the content of Shortways in particular based on questions asked by employees, and to encourage its use when receiving questions and with newcomers.
Chloé Longuet : In addition to the assistant, we have tutorials in our LMS on certain aspects of COL’T. We therefore have the idea of creating a short tutorial dedicated to the use of Shortways, to introduce its functionalities to employees who would not have had the information, such as newcomers.
The Shortways content being easier to maintain than the documentation in the LMS, we emphasize updating and completeness of the information in the Assistant, to guide our users more easily. The idea is to adapt the information contained in the LMS tutorials to simplify our documentation, avoid duplication, and promote the digital assistant for help on COL’T.
Finally, we plan to integrate Shortways consultation recommendations into the hotline memos: “Have you looked in the online help? “.
How long did it take to create the content, and did you face any difficulties?
Chloé Longuet : The ease of handling the Shortways Designer and the responsiveness of the Shortways team were a real plus.
Content creation is fast. We spent 3 months almost full-time on Shortways, but it was above all the upstream work on the HR rules to be integrated that was time-consuming: the reflection on the messages to be conveyed in the content took more time than the implementation itself, in particular on the HR rules which required information and validation from various interlocutors. The phase of creating and updating content via Shortways remains faster and easier than writing and updating long operating procedures.
Since the deployment of COL’T and Shortways, we only spend a few hours a month at most on the Shortways Designer: to create new content following questions from employees, HR news or COL’T news, and to analyze Shortways statistics.
What measures/deployment indicators have been monitored, and what use of dashboards has been put in place to monitor content?
Céline Buisson : For the first few months, we looked at the statistics every week, to make sure that our instructions were clear and understood, and to check whether our colleagues were downloading the extension.
So we first monitored the Assistant’s download statistics.
The usage statistics by type of content via the dashboards provided by Shortways were our second pillar to see that all types of content are used in similar proportions, which reinforced the content choices we had made.
The statistics concerning the results of the search bar of the Assistant also help us to adapt the content according to the searches that our employees carry out: we thus detect the themes that we have not covered and we create associated content, or add the keyword to the existing content.
The dashboard finally allows us to detect possible issues on the step-by-step: not played to the end because of a badly configured step for example, so as to improve them.
All these statistics allow us to continuously improve our content for ever more relevance and usefulness.
At the same time, the incident statistics enabled us to ensure that Shortways as such did not generate an incident: we have thus counted very few calls to the hotline since the deployment: only 5 Shortways incidents in 5 months, each of them concerning people who failed to download the extension, against 100 COL’T incidents.
What are the benefits of this project with Shortways?
Chloé Longuet : The integration of Shortways in Kelio has empowered employees by promoting access to information directly in the tool, when they need it and in their context of use of the tool .
The assistant has made it possible to centralize the accompanying content: to provide up-to-date content to users and easier to maintain for administrators.
There are still other operating modes on the side that we will gradually optimize to simplify access to information, and reduce the update load that other sources can generate, and also continue to reduce the user support load.
Céline Buisson : We are satisfied with the way employees have adopted the digital assistant.
We have very good feedback from our users (employees, managers and administrators), who find the tool practical and useful, and project themselves into uses that we had not even imagined.
Our management particularly appreciates the possibilities of sharing regulatory information in Shortways, so that our employees access this information directly when they use the tool.
Our challenge was to successfully deploy COL’T to all of our employees and Shortways has largely contributed to this success: the results are very positive!
Thanks to Céline and Chloé for their enriching feedback!
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