Missouri Lottery Success Story

How do you train a mobile and fast-paced workforce an entirely new email client? With BrainStorm QuickHelp!

The Challenge

It takes a certain amount of time for enterprise training to be truly effective, but employees can’t always drop everything they’re doing to sit through long hours of instruction.

Missouri Lottery is one such organization that intimately understands the challenges associated with introducing a new software program into a fast-paced work environment. With roughly 150 employees, many of whose schedules are jam-packed with various meetings and business trips, the company was eager to find a way to make the most of the user-adoption process when it made the switch to Microsoft Outlook from another email client.

“We only have 150 employees that manage a billion-dollar budget industry, so our staff is extremely busy,” Terri Haake, human resources manager at Missouri Lottery, explained.

She said the company’s sales reps also travel on a regular basis, meaning they are rarely in the office for meetings. At a certain point, day-long training sessions aimed at eliminating the learning curve of a new software program are simply a waste of time.

The BrainStorm Solution

What Missouri Lottery needed was a flexible software adoption solution that integrated seamlessly with the staff’s busy schedules. Because it’s so hard for the company to get all of its employees in the same room on any given day, the HR team was also hungry for long-term training tools that could be referenced at everyone’s own convenience. These needs eventually led the company to BrainStorm’s QuickHelp Video Training solutions.

Haake said the decision to choose QuickHelp over any other tool was the fact that it could serve as a more dynamic alternative to a one-time training session. Rather than sitting through long hours of instruction to get a general overview of the software, the videos suddenly offered a way for employees to get their specific questions answered as soon as they arose. It turned out this strategy also fit better with everyone’s busy schedules.

“They can watch them at 8 o’clock at night if they want to, or at 4 in the morning, or at noon,” Haake said. “Sometimes, a lot of these people, they’ll catch up on their email in their hotel rooms in the evenings after their conferences are over. So it’s great for the fast-paced environment that we work in.”

Haake added that the QuickHelp videos also introduced a wider variety of training tools for workers to access on a regular basis. In fact, she said Missouri Lottery is now able to let its staff choose how they want their software questions answered. While the organization doesn’t rule out the importance of classroom training in some circumstances, offering small pieces of information is generally a best practice for boosting overall productivity.

“Keeping it short and making it optional is always good because employees do need to take responsibility for their own professional development in certain ways,” Haake said.

The Results

Since Missouri Lottery integrated QuickHelp into its Microsoft suite, employees have noticed subtle improvements in both knowledge and productivity. For example, Haake said a video addressing how to create out-of-office auto responses in Outlook 2010 led to a chain reaction of increased efficiency. Not only were employees able to easily figure how to complete this function, but the colleagues and customers they work with on a daily basis eventually benefited from knowing that staff members wouldn’t be able to reply immediately when they were out of town.

QuickHelp videos have also made it easier for Haake to communicate software-related tips and tricks to a spread-out workforce. Haake said the office at Missouri Lottery isn’t as tight-knit as those of other organizations, meaning people are rarely ever in the same place at the same time.

The long-term benefit, she added, is the ability to send video clips remotely so employees can reference them at their own convenience. As HR manager, Haake places a high priority on taking care of her employees. She said BrainStorm’s QuickHelp solutions make it easier for her to do that in meaningful ways.

“I love this program [referring to QuickHelp], she said. “I like learning new things. I think most of us like to learn new things - especially if it’s going to help us do our jobs faster and better.”