Transcript
or our first one for February. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate you guys taking out the time in your busy days to kind of learn a little bit more about IT leadership and a little bit about training technicians. So this topic, training technicians on how to interact with users, actually kind of spawned from Jennifer's presentation at Spice World talking about how you can train your technicians to better interact with users. So I decided to bring her on and a couple of other IT leaders to talk a little bit about how you can improve that relationship between IT and users, which can be a constant stressor, and hopefully make that make those interactions a little bit easier, a little bit better, and not just for the users, but also for your technicians, too. So before we get started, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our panel or have them introduce themselves, talk a little bit about how long they've been in IT, how long they've been in IT leadership, and yeah, just a little bit about their journey. So Steve, do you want to go ahead and kick it off? Yeah. So I'm Steve Radabaugh. I work for Range, which is an ISP. I do all the internal IT, but we do have an MSP branch. I started out in IT in high school. I'm still a teacher and say, hey, everybody, here's a quiz. Steve, go fix my printer. You're getting an A on the quiz. But after I got out of college, I went to work for a cable company and did some in-home IT type stuff back in the days of the blaster virus going around all over the place. Went to work for Geek Squad for a while in the free Best Buy days, and I've since moved to Wyoming. There's not a lot of tech jobs in rural Wyoming, so I worked for a school district for a while, and then I did freelance IT, kind of a one-man MSP shop, and now I work for the phone company, MSP. Awesome. Well, it's good to have you on again. Thanks for taking some time out. Kelly, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Kelly Schrader. I work for a network of K-12 charters in Colorado, and I've been in IT for, oh, coming up on about 25 years. Yeah, kind of started in the same rough place as Steve did, just doing whatever, and then slowly have progressed through to now where I'm leading a team of about 13 people across our school districts, so lots of fun, but lots of crazy too. Yeah, I'm sure managing that many people or that many teams too can be, I'm sure, a lot. Jennifer, do you want to introduce yourself? I know this is the first time you've been on the stream as well, so. Yeah. I'm Jennifer. I am from St. Louis. I've been in IT for, I think, 20-ish years. It all runs together at this point. I started off in college and ended up literally taking over the help desk by the time I graduated. I am finally now back in higher ed after supporting just about every type of person that you can imagine, but I'm really glad to be back at the higher ed roots at St. Louis Community College. I think that was all I needed to cover, so. Awesome. Well, thank you for jumping on. Like I said, you had a really great presentation at Spice World talking about this topic, and so I wanted to get you on and kind of go through some of those tips and tricks that you had for training your technicians on how to deal with end users, which honestly can be way more complicated than working on the technology itself, so. Oh, yeah. The technology is the easy part. It's the users that are the hard part. Yeah, yeah. I absolutely get that as an introvert, and it's hard for me to know how to interact with people in the best way sometimes, but thank you so much for hopping on. So, to kind of get started, I wanted to hear a little bit about how many team members you do have and how many of them are actually new to IT, so this question will be for everyone, but, yeah, I would love to hear a little bit about the team that you have. I have four and a half. I think one of them, they've been with us for five years now, but this was his first IT job, and my half person is, she's brand new. She's just learning IT as she does this. She's also our customer help. She works for our customer service department, so that's the nice part. She always has that customer service background, I think, and she's just learning all the technical stuff. Yeah, how about you, Kelly? I know that you have, you said, 13 people on the IT team, so curious how that experience has been and what experience your team has with that particular group. Yeah, I've got the full gamut, and I've got a couple of old salts. I've been in IT for as long as I have, and then probably close to half the team, this is their first IT job, and then probably about a quarter of the team, this is their first adult job. So, we're, you know, tech support in a school is, in a K-12 school, is pretty straightforward. So, I enjoy being able to help people get started in the industry and give people an opportunity that don't necessarily have the resume that would get them looked at in a different place. Yeah, and how do you, how do your older, more experienced team members, are they able to help out and mentor those that don't have a lot of experience in IT? Yeah, I actually, I'm really blessed because the folks that I do have, even though there's a couple of curmudgeons, generally though, are very supportive of the rest of the team and make it a high priority to mentor and help develop. There's a little bit of friction sometimes within the team, but it's almost always communication. That's what it comes back to, but we've got a pretty good mentoring culture. Yeah. How about you, Jennifer? What does your team look like? So, at my campus, we, huge team, huge. It's me, a media tech, and a student worker. Yeah, so much to keep track of. So many, so many people. So, you know, we have just our support from the district-wide IT departments and other campuses when we need them, but for at least right now, we'll see what happens when our new building goes up. It is just the three of us, so I have been around the block quite a bit. I'm media tech. While she is really familiar with, like, media side of things, not so much, like, the support side of things, and my student worker is great, and I'm not saying that just because she's right over there, but she is working towards a cybersecurity degree, so she's got a good basis of the tech, and a lot of it right now is kind of learning that user-to-tech translation software to figure out what people actually mean when they say something, which is really hard. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Whenever y'all are training new people, what are some of the first things that you make sure to tell them about interacting with users? Me, in particular, I always try to give a kind of a low-down of the user while we're walking to them, just, like, personality type, how familiar they are with technology, or to tone down any lingo to fit more what they are working, you know, what they're going to be dealing with, to keep the user from getting any more flustered than they already are. What kind of, like, how do you keep track of all those different personalities, I guess, because depending on how big of an organization you're supporting, I can imagine that some of these organizations are pretty large and a pretty big variety of people, so how do you keep track of all of those different kinds of personalities and stuff? Well, for us, I have a really small campus, so that helps, but usually the people that you have to be aware of, you're going to work with enough to know right off the bat, so, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I think that's probably the same for us, too, is the few people that you really need to know something about, somebody will tell you about them before you interact with them, but for the most part, most people are pretty similar, you know, there's not a lot to keep track of personality-to-personality other than just getting to know people. And how important is getting to know people for being in IT, and how do you encourage your team I think it's important enough so that it'll make those conversations go a lot easier. Like I had, at our position where I'm at now, we had one that a lot of people had said, oh, you need to really be careful with her, she gets really ornery, and I think that's a big part of it, is getting to know people, and I think that's a big part of it, is getting to know people, and I think that's a big part of it, is getting to know people, and I think that's a big part of it, is getting to know people, and I've connected with her over, we both have tattoos, and she was the first person to know my new tattoo, and so she's like, I would doubt that, and since then, she's been a lot easier for me to work with, people, so just finding those little things, and I want to encourage my people to, you know, just be friendly, make jokes, you know, don't berate people, there's a lot of it, you know, I've had, you know, I had one guy, he would, we'd change people's passwords, he'd temporarily set the password to Curtis Likes Cookies, because his name was Curtis, and people, you know, they think it's funny, and they remember that, and they kind of said to my teams a little. So with us, we do have kind of a fine line to walk with that, the tech that was here before me didn't feel like he needed to follow the set procedures, and especially putting in tickets, he would rather just everybody come to him. So there's been a lot of breaking that habit, and it's kind of forced me to kind of step back from being buddy-buddy with as many users, because especially when I have somebody said to my face, or in front of me that, oh, no, you don't need to put in a ticket, you just need to go tell Jennifer, like, no, no, no, yeah, opposite of what anybody in IT would want. Yeah, so that has been kind of a rough part to kind of figure out that balancing act, especially when, you know, the lockdown started, and I made the mistake of adding somebody on Facebook Messenger, because we were playing Animal Crossing together, and then she started trying to submit tickets to me through Facebook Messenger. So that was, that was something fun to get her to walk back on. Yeah, so yeah, there is a fine line of being friendly with the users and keeping that professionalism, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I, through Facebook Messenger is wild. That is a wild story of them asking for support through a completely personal channel. Yeah, it was, and she did it a few times, or from like, yeah, you can't, I can't, no, you need to do it the right way. And then she finally got, well, she finally got the message, but I think it helped more that she left the position shortly thereafter. But you know, sometimes problems just solve themselves, you know, at some point. Yeah. Kelly, what about you? How are you kind of training your newer texts on how to engage with users and some tips? I, I like to start with, with vision. Some of that's just because of the way my brain is wired, but I found that it really is helps ground perspective for people. I use Maslow's hierarchy, which is, it's a, it's a hierarchy of needs. It basically says if you, if you don't meet the need at a given level, you can't progress to the next level in terms of meeting needs. And so it's, I don't remember all the levels off the top of my head. I'll try and post an image in chat after, after I'm done talking, but it's, the second level is safety and security. And I realized a few years ago that tech support actually lands in that space for people who are non-technical. If you walk into the office or a workspace or an area where somebody who's non-technical needs something, the change in their perspective, the change in their, their energy is really marked when they have confidence in the person walking in that's going to solve their problems. And I found that, that connecting my texts with that perspective of your work matters. You're not just clicking the button, hitting reboot, unplugging the HDMI cable and plugging it back in again. I mean, that's what you're doing functionally, but the reality is, is you're making a difference in the person's day. And if you walk into that room with a level of authority, knowing that you're contributing to the, their wellbeing, it puts a totally different spin on how they enter the room in that conversation. And so giving them that grounding, I think has made a big difference for a lot of my texts to get it out of that, you know, cause the ones who do have experience are, you know, Geek Squad or Helping Family or whatever. And they, they come in with a mindset of, you know, I'm smarter than you, or you're, you're, you're annoying because, you know, you should know to just reboot your computer when Teams stops working for the 91st time, you know, there's that temptation, but the vision just, it, it, I think, I personally think, and maybe there's some bias there, but I think it's made a big difference for my team to change their kind of entry point into support interactions. Yeah. Something that the, in the presentation that I did at Spice World that I brought up, it's like, I can get so frustrated, especially with math faculty and, and the, the, the very simple issues that they are bringing to me. But then I'm like, just try to imagine what happened if I had to walk in front of a classroom of students and try to teach the math, it would be absolutely laughable. So when I started getting frustrated with the user, I just have to think that, you know, I have to remember they have their job for a reason. And I certainly probably would not be able to do their job. So that that's one way to kind of reframe the thought to handle it a bit better. Yeah. How do y'all handle, or how do you inform your techs on how to handle a situation where a user is obviously very frustrated, and he's kind of taking it out on the technician. And so the technician, you know, rightfully so wants to probably not be as friendly as they would be or, or, you know, not have that good relationship with that user. How do you help them kind of guide through those situations? A lot of that is just reminding them that the user is frustrated with the issue, not with them. And, you know, that's where knowing your users comes in. Because if a certain person is putting in a ticket, and I can tell from the ticket, they're, they're really frustrated, I will be the one kind of taking point on that. So they, you know, my student worker can see how I'm handling the situation, while not putting her in that line of fire. And, you know, letting management manage. You know, that's where a lot of it comes down to is if somebody's getting probably a step beyond the frustrated part and taking it out on the tax, then that would just run it up the the corporate ladder and let somebody else, you know, a more appropriate person handle it. But with a lot of those frustrated users, you know, once you fix the problem, it's just gonna all that frustration is just going to be gone. So yeah, yeah. So what I'm hearing is a lot of patience. Yeah, patience, letting it just, you know, run off the back and just, you know, they're, they're not angry at me, they're angry at the situation. So let them run through their frustration, let them get it out. And then do whatever I can to get the problem fixed as quick as possible. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely really tempting to step in, when just handle it, you know, and I, I think if I said this before, and other things, I see myself as a crap umbrella. This is a situation where I'll, I'll try to shield my guys. My team. Yeah. Yeah, I like a crap umbrella as a term for, for a lot of IT leaders. I feel like that's, it's not far off most of the time. So speaking of difficult users, have there been any specific instances that you can remember where you had to guide a tech through a challenging user interaction? And maybe how did you guide them through it? A good job interview question. Yeah, it is. Actually, I think that is about one of our interview questions. Yeah, right along with the changing your communication style to match the style of another. Yeah, so I mean, that's also a good question to Jennifer, like, how do you? I mean, it's, it's that code switching mentality where you have to kind of change how you interact with people based on their communication styles. So that's another good question, too, is how do you train people to do that? Or is that something that's inherent? Oh, so with the first question, a difficult situation that I had to help walk my student worker through was, if I can recall correctly, it was some kind of issue with printing from Google, no, printing from OneDrive, through the web. And for whatever reason, it wasn't working. I think I ended up finding that it was just a bug. But the user would not want to accept that it's just like, this is just, we don't know why it started there. It's a bug, it just happens. So I kind of had to coach conversations beforehand of what she could expect the user to say and how to handle those kind of reactions, and then how to document the entire conversation afterwards. One of the things that I coach my team on is, is the value of empathy. Even if you don't feel empathetic or want to be empathetic, because the hard conversations usually are repeated. It's, it's that, that wonderful person that you know you're going back to again. And so what I've had to do with, with my techs is first, be empathetic for towards them. Draw out their frustrations, listen to what they're feeling before they walk into the situation, especially for those repeat, repeat offenders. And then, and then, and then, and then, and then, repeat offenders. And also model it when it's an after the fact, you know, I just, I just had this person unload on me and that was unfun. And so I engage my own empathy with them by listening to them and not solving the problem, but just hearing what they're describing and asking them questions about what, what happened and what they thought about it. And then asking them to go back to the user. The other, the other big thing that I found is I, I've been, finally got around to binge watching all of Ted Lasso over Christmas. And I realized that, that the key thing in Ted Lasso's leadership that I wanted to model in my own is forgiveness. And it's really easy to, to build up that, that history of slights and frustrations and irritations with, with people. But when you, when you choose forgiveness, it makes a difference. And it allows, I found for myself, it allows me to re-humanize the person rather than just them being the problem that, you know, they're, they're a real person who's dealing with this frustration, this angst. And it was always said, it's not about me, actually, it's not about my tech. It's about the technology that they're struggling with and their own sense of inadequacy or fear or embarrassment, shame, you know, all these things that are building up and they come out as anger. And when you, when you can humanize them, then it's kind of, oh, let me, let me listen to you and fix your problem. And then, man, that makes all the rest of the interactions better. Maybe not amazingly better because some people are just salty in general. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's like, good life advice too, is forgiveness. And man, making me contemplate everything too. Yeah, I, I also wanted to know, you know, the kind of, I think Jennifer, you might have alluded to it or something, but after being quarantined and after everybody's working from home and now a lot of people are now remote workers, how does that make these relationships different and how does it change those and how does it change the way that you might also train people and use interactions when it used to be a lot easier, you, they could walk over to a desk and have that personal connection, whereas, at least for me, all of my interactions with IT go through Slack or email or a ticket, things like that. So, how do you handle that change to a remote environment? At least here, that isn't something that I've, I have to say, I don't know. I don't think I've I've, I have to deal with a lot because the nature of higher ed, most of our people are literally here. And then the rest just goes back to when I, like, I'm covering help desk calls, you know, all that is, you know, it's just what I was always used to with doing help desk. The, some of the, you know, the opportunities for some of those, like, in person communications, like, pulling up a chair in one of my power office, power users office and talking things out with them, you know, that that did change. But sometimes it is easier just to throw over a Teams message and do it, be it text rather than in person. So, Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it definitely simplified some things. Especially since now people are more used to reaching out through Teams or some, you know, you know, other communications. Tracking me down has become a little easier, which yeah, somewhat good, somewhat bad. I've encouraged my team when they're, when they're supporting somebody that's not local to try to get on a call, you know, especially a video call like this. It's, it's just, it's helpful to see the other person's face and be able to see their expressions. Especially if, you know, it's not going to be a fun conversation, trying to do that via Teams just, I don't know, personally, I've, I've had those go wrong more often than not. Usually I'm the one getting irritated and I shouldn't be, but getting on those, getting on those, just, hey, can, it's fine, 15 minutes. Let's just have a quick call and, and usually it's even faster to support. So there is a bit of helping my, my introverts get over the, but I don't want to call. I just want to send a text, text-based message. Yeah, I experienced the same friction. I don't want to do it either, but having that, you know, this is actually going to be faster and better in the end. If you just get on the phone, get on Teams, do video chat, you're, everybody's life is going to be better with having that kind of an interaction in general. There are exceptions, but yeah. Yeah, getting out of the call and screen-sharing is almost as good as being in person. I mean, it's not quite, but you can help a person quite a bit just, you know, and I'll, I'll be like, yeah, call with them and then, you know, either remote in their computer or just do this Teams share screen and do it that way. Pretty effective. Mm-hmm. So I was curious to see if you guys had any overarching tips aside from the ones that you've shared already, but any overarching tips that you would give somebody that is training their team to interact with users? Anything that we might've missed, might've left out that you wanted to throw into here on that user interaction training? I am pulling up my PowerPoint from the presentation. Specifically with like desk-side support, if you do not have a very good reason for sticking to like business professional or even business casual dress code, don't. Especially when it comes to like desk-side support, because we're going to be crawling under desks and yeah, nobody wants to be doing that in a skirt. And where is my presentation? It makes a lot of sense. Well, I mean, that can get awkward. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you can just be in jeans and a t-shirt, it's a lot easier to Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you can just be in jeans and a t-shirt, it's a lot easier to root around under a desk and unplug and plug things back in. Funny, funny story, Jennifer, while you're looking for that. We had a policy that you don't wear shorts to work unless you're doing dirty or summer work. And one of the guys on the team decided that since he was explicitly told he couldn't wear shorts, that he would wear a kilt. He's no longer with the organization, so. Yeah. Did he, was everybody cool with it or did he get, no. No, he wasn't. He was instructed to go back and change. I mean, we, yeah, we have pretty clear dress code. I mean, it's K-12. Dress code rules are very, very laid out, so. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So I found my presentation. So more for the people who have been around IT for a while and know the acronym BOFH. Trying to, I'll say, prank a user is, sounds really fun in your head, but being the one that fixes it is going to just make things worse. So I will always encourage my techs to think about it, imagine how fun it would be, and then let it go. Remind techs that when they're in that bright, shiny, new part of the position, but like when they're brand new, that the expectations they set with users, all of the other techs are going to have to live with those expectations. That was something I had to learn the hard way this job because I did not have much to do around here. I'm a very small campus. So I was always right there to help set up for an event. And then the people holding the events were expecting that level of service at the other campuses. So my manager had to come to me and say, the other techs are getting harassed and given a hard time by the users because they are not providing the same level of service you do here. So back off. That was a really hard lesson for me to learn, but it has made a big difference. Make friends with support staff. That is something that I will always stress to anyone that I am training. Housekeeping, facilities, administrative assistants, because they are the ones that know everything. And don't feed co-workers to buses. So while it may, at the moment, be easier to say, oh, well, this tech must have done something wrong. That is just going to encourage the users to forego the normal procedures of submitting a ticket so they can make sure they are getting you because you are the one they can trust. And that co-worker is going to hear about it and drama. And then another very hard lesson for me to learn was let bosses do the bossy things. And having your manager kind of counterman something you have said or a set policy can kind of sting in the moment, but that kind of is taking things off of your plate. And then, oh, especially when you have a new technician, my thing that I always say is any bit of information that you have to try to hunt down, document. Get that in the knowledge base because if you can't find it immediately, that means we need to have it in the knowledge base. And then, of course, documentation, I think, is absolutely huge. Yeah. And then one thing I'm still learning on or about is not hoarding old stuff. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I feel that personally. Yeah. N64 is back here, too. Yes, there's just a lot of stuff back here. Well, this campus was built in 2010. When I went to clean everything out, I was throwing away boxes. And I mean literal boxes. I was throwing away boxes. I was throwing away boxes. I was throwing away boxes. I was throwing away boxes. I was throwing away boxes. When I went to clean everything out, I was throwing away boxes. And I mean literal boxes of PS2 keyboards and mice. I was able to surplus to my house a slide carousel projector with bulbs and spare carousels and then one of the, you know, the 80s style camcorders. So, I don't know what they were even doing here, but I wasn't going to turn down cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Brittany, to answer your question, just to add on to Jennifer, because she, that nailed I think 90% of it. The other thing I found is that good tech support starts with hiring. I can teach hard skills. I can teach people how to fix things, but I can't teach people to not be a jerk. Yeah. I can put boundaries on them and constrain jerkness, but, you know, if somebody is fundamentally just abrasive to their fellow humans, it's really hard to change that. So, I've changed my hiring practices so that we touch soft, we touch technical skills very little in the interviews. It's 90% what kind of a human are you and how do you treat your fellow humans kind of questions. I've heard that many times. I'd say as long as they're coachable, I'll do that. I've had people who are like, oh, I'm at NIT for this many years. You can tell they're a great, neat person, but it's difficult to get them to learn new things sometimes. But, yeah, I've met many people over the careers like, oh, they're an amazing tech. You can just stick them in a back room and never have them interact with people. They'd be awesome. But, yeah, it's really hard to get those people to work with teaching people. One of the interview questions I've always used is, you know, explain to me how a hard drive and a motherboard and a processor all interact with each other the way you would explain it to your grandmother. I have a good analogy for that one, actually. Yeah, and see what they say. See what they come up with. So, our set interview questions are largely behavioral. I think we only have like two or three like actual tech questions on there. Of course, those are the ones that are almost always those responses. One of them, my favorite person that I interviewed was, what is the event viewer and what information can you find there? And they're like, oh, that's where you find your calendar and your meetings and stuff. And like, okay, let's move on. That's a good educated guess. As someone that's not in IT, I mean, that seems right to me. Yeah, I think hiring and having those questions, I think that's definitely a huge part of baseline. A technical skills, definitely helpful, but having that ability for empathy and patience and things like that, those are much harder to train for. And I think a lot of that is, I don't know if people realize the value of having those people that aren't in IT. I don't know if they realize how patient people in IT have to be in order to get through a lot of this stuff. Yeah, as Audrey said, we look for a customer service background first and foremost. As Kelly noted, we can teach IT. So, definitely important. Another part of that is also being careful of how you write job descriptions. As something that we also touched in with on the women in IT panel at Spice World was women tend to only apply for positions that they check every box, while men are going to apply for anything that fits any other boxes. So, when writing that job description, like separating required by requested or recommended would also make a big difference with the type of people that you're getting in to interview. Yeah, that's good to know. There in the leadership lab, we have sample IT job descriptions. So, if anybody is looking for help in how to create a job description, we have them in the blueprints in there. Yeah, I think that's all I have for me. Any last parting words? I know that can definitely be a complex topic, but I feel like we touched on a lot. All right. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining today. Really appreciate the feedback, y'all. As always, really great to have you on. Oh, actually, Robert came in with a comment in the chat that I wanted to highlight. He said my last hire was based on the only requirement was that they met the IT skills. We did not get along well. It was the oddest issues that would come up. I will now ask more questions to try and figure out what their personality is like and if they're a good fit for the team and current work environment. So, you know, as y'all have said, IT skills, really important, but also having that customer service or that kind of mentality is really important as well. But, yes, thank y'all again for joining. Really appreciate it. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. We're actually going to be talking about public speaking. We're going to have Danny Brown on. He will be discussing how you can be a better public speaker, whether that is in front of a big group or in a one-on-one or even a team meeting and how those public speaking skills can kind of translate to those different avenues. But, yeah, in the meantime, I hope you have a good rest of the day, and I will see y'all in a couple of weeks. All right. Take care. Thank you. Thanks.
