In this cultivated episode, Greg DeVore, CEO of ScreenSteps, shares how he helps business cut their onboarding time from 12 months to 30 days and also double their employee productivity through guided knowledge.

You will discover:

– What tribal knowledge is and how over-relying on it is costing you dearly
– Why your employees need a GPS not a map
– Why you don’t want your employees working from memory

Episode Transcript

Scott Ritzheimer

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach. And you bet I am here with yet another high demand coach, that is the one the only Greg DeVore. Now in 2003, Greg co founded his company screen steps, along with his brother. Now screen steps is dedicated to helping businesses to transfer knowledge to their employees faster. They do this through a combination of a software platform and a framework that guides organizations and reducing their reliance on tribal knowledge. Now, this has resulted in an onboarding process that cut new hire times to proficiency from get this 12 months to less than 30 days. That’s basically printing money for anyone who’s listening here. We’re gonna dive into that here in a bit. Greg co authored the book, find and follow reduce supervisor burnout, and improve employee performance by transferring knowledge faster. Well, Greg, so excited to have you here on the show. Told you as we’re getting ready to hear, I’ve got like a million questions that I’ve got ready for you, I don’t think we’ll get to all million of them, but at least 999,000. So, before we get to any of that, though, I’d love for you to just add a little color to this background of yours. What were you doing before 2003? When you launch the company? And how did it lead you to making the leap?

Greg DeVore

Well, it’s, it was totally by accident. So I actually graduated from the Berklee College of Music with a degree in composition films. Great. So I was in LA working in film scoring industry, you know, doing the different jobs there. And I got a lot of work training people, composers on music, software, logic, audio wasn’t bought by Apple the time but it was early on. But at the same time, my first son was born while I was on vacation very prematurely. So he was under two pounds when he was born. So I was told I would never be able to get health insurance for him while I was an independent musician. So that necessitated a career shift. My brother had this opportunity, somebody had asked him to build some training for GE ultrasound systems. He said, you want to do this. And we did some projects on the side before. So we started the company there, really, to get health insurance. But that led us down this journey of tackling this problem of tribal knowledge.

Scott Ritzheimer

That’s fascinating, fascinating. Well, you set it up perfectly, because the first question I had for you out of the gate is, what is tribal knowledge? What’s the cost of over relying on it? And is there a better way?

Greg DeVore

The tribal knowledge is all the knowledge that’s in your organization that stuck in people’s heads. It’s a knowledge that is specific to your business. But it’s not really written down anywhere. Now, there’s tribal knowledge, that’s actually good. It’s what makes your business unique. But when your business starts solely relying on tribal knowledge, everything stuck in people’s heads, like I just have to observe people to learn how to work here, that can really impact you, especially in your operations, a customer facing role, it gets really hard to stay consistent, to be efficient, to manage change, when all you’re doing is relying on hey, if you want to know how to do this, go talk to Steve, you want to know how to do this go talk to Karen, because what happens if Steve or Karen Lee or they’re not available? People can’t work?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. And so what do we what do we do about it? How do you overcome this challenge? Because you don’t want folks to get dumber? That’s not what you’re recommending. But how do we move from this tribal knowledge? And what do we move to?

Greg DeVore

Well, so a lot of organizations say, Okay, well, we just need to document our procedures, right? We’re going to document everything. What we’ve found is we worked with organizations is they will have mountains of documentation. But when you look at how people behave, they still behave in a tribal knowledge, fashion. So when they don’t know what to do, they ask a coworker, they ask a supervisor, they’re not using that. What we try to help businesses do is move to a guided knowledge platform or our way of behaving so that when I’m not sure what to do, I bring up guided knowledge, I bring up a GPS, instead of relying on a map that I memorized, you know, six months ago, to sort of help them do that you have to it’s not a technology problem by itself. You can buy all sorts of technology and still be this problem. There is a process that you go through, that’s our final follow framework, where you help people identify what jobs people actually need to be able to do what questions they have to answer problems you have to solve. And then you help them design with that end in mind, digital guides that are findable, followable and scannable. So I can find it in five seconds. I can follow it without a supervisor, and I can scan it. Even if I’m talking to a customer I’m not gonna have to say wait a second, while I read this 20 page document and train

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. I love that you brought up the point that it’s not a software thing, right? Especially coming from someone who’s who sells software for a living but it because it’s not right and to your point. Organizations that I’m working with, they have this stuff written down. So they’re kind of like oh, No, that’s not us. But it’s so out of date. Right? It’s so irrelevant. It’s so not helpful. It’s so tedious, or it’s so compact, that it’s not actually all that useful and just trying to cram something into a new technology and think that that solve your problem really does. So how is it then that we really get to the bottom of what needs to be in these documents? How do we write great SOPs? How do we get? How do we get them to meet the criteria you just laid out?

Greg DeVore

Well, let me tell you example, a client we worked with. So they had all this information, you watch their employees, they were doing medical scheduling, right? For a lot of organizations, they had all this information, you’d watch them, they were amazing, they’re flying all over the screen. I mean, they’ve got, you know, 50 tabs open, and they’re working. But it was just too much to process. A and it was too hard to get the right information at the right time. So all we did with them as we first run what we call a fine and follow workshop. And that’s where you do a deep analysis of what are the questions I’ve been asked, What do I need to what are the tasks I need to perform? What are the problems I need to solve? And we typically find through that, that about 50%, of what they have to do is not written down anywhere. It’s just that by taking them through that process, taking them through designing what we call a fine and follow training program, they were able to double knot the productivity of their tenured agents, they had new hires twice as productive as their tenured employees coming right out of the bat. And then the tinder employee said, oh, wait a minute, we need to start working this way. Because these new people are kicking our butt here. They’re, people always assume that I’m gonna work faster when I work from memory. And that’s actually not true. Oh, it requires too much cognitive load. If we’re dealing with complex issues, it’s too much work, we make mistakes, we back up, we’re stressed about whether or not we’re forgetting something. So when we move to these guided this guided knowledge, we’re much more efficient, much lower levels of stress tests, and we can offer better we can be more productive in what we’re doing.

Scott Ritzheimer

Wow. So in your intro, that there’s a pretty stunning statement that you you help someone or and maybe you’ve done this more than once, but cut their their time to proficiency from 12 months, all the way down to 30 days. One, how do you do that? And to in the real world where this has actually happened, what was the impact that it had on the organization you helped?

Greg DeVore

Yeah, so the, the team we worked with there, they said it was the greatest human experiment they’ve ever been part of. Because it wasn’t just the metrics that improved the whole culture of the organization, the the mood, it was a very hard place to work. It was, things were very difficult. A lot of people are the first imagine for the first 12 months you’re working there. All you can really do is say I tried to solve this and then escalated up to someone. You don’t get a job. So you can do that. Right? You want to help people, you need that dopamine rush of I did this I was I helped here. So I love the story. They tell us that they had and we tell us in the book, this one employee that they’ve gone through the process. I’ll explain that in a second. But this next question came in, and she always had to escalate it before. And she and her supervisor said I saw she was gonna escalate it. I said, No, you can do this. So she brings up the digital guide, she goes through the super complex procedure. And she does it successfully, she’s able to help the person calling it as she said, she hung up the call, she jumped up rolled around, put her hand up there and said, I did it. And so that’s that’s really what we’re working towards. How do we get to that moment of that employee saying I can do this on my own as quickly as possible. Now the way that that happens is the framework what it does is after we’ve done that analysis of what they have to do, we separate out foundational and actual knowledge. And what is that foundational knowledge? Is any the background information I need to know to work in your business and understand what’s going on? It’s like, what do we do here? What tools do we use? What type of customers do we service? What kind of, you know, what’s the general idea so I know the neighborhood I’m working in. But actionable knowledge is just this is what I need to do. These are the decisions I need to make. These are the process procedures I need to follow. Most training mixes those all up together. And what we do is we help people separate that out. So now I’ve got the I know the foundational knowledge, but I’m never going to memorize the actual knowledge. I’m trained to rely on that in a digital guide every time. And that frees up the brain space, the cognitive load so much that I can be confident and productive and very consistent at what I’m doing.

Scott Ritzheimer

Wow. So I just want to make sure that I repeat that because it’s it’s a remarkable difference for the way most of these programs are designed. But we want to we want to know understand and be intimately aware of the foundational knowledge, the context in which we work, but you don’t actually want your people memorizing it. Every single step and the actual knowledge that they need to take, exactly.

Greg DeVore

And that’s a big like, it’s so contrary to what we’re used to. We’re like, we want to learn these procedures. But when you think about it, these procedures can change all the time, the software using changes, the regulation changes. So what good is there and memorizing these procedures. But if I can get very good at following a digital guide, we had one group that it would take them two weeks for a change to ripple through their organization. When they adopted this system, it went down to less than an hour. Well, it’s now people were not saying, you know, people say, Well, you know, we trained, but now it changes, we got to retrain them, if they’re following digital guides, you don’t have to retrain or simple changes. They just, it’s like a GPS, if you know that streets closed, the GPS can reroute me around it, if I’m following a digital guide, and the procedure changes. I’m just gonna adapt to the new procedure.

Scott Ritzheimer

Wow. So you bring up a point and how I actually pull on the counter side of this, but how do you keep the digital guide? How do you keep this stuff up to date, when the world around us is changing faster and faster and faster?

Greg DeVore

It’s so funny, because everybody assumes that this is going to be a technological solution. There’s definitely software things that you can do that make this a lot easier. But a lot of it, I’d say 80% of is a behavioral thing. The thing that happens is when people are relying on these guides all the time, when they’re used, they get updated. Because we have a whole system where the person who has to use it can add feedback that flows right back in to the person who’s in charge of that procedure. So there’ll be going through and say, Hey, wait a minute, the customer said that this didn’t work like this didn’t work out, or I tried this. And it was different than what it tells me it should be here that goes right in that comes back to them. And they’re going to update it oftentimes that same day, right at that moment. So that behavior change that feedback loop solves a lot of that problem. And then there’s technological things you could do on that to make sure that things are reviewed regularly to make it faster to update. But a lot of that is if it gets used, it’ll get updated. If it doesn’t get used, it’s gonna get ignored.

Scott Ritzheimer

What a fantastic point. And what a startling symptom. But how many folks have SOPs that have not been changed in five years? Right? There’s no way that people are actually following that. Because back to your point on tribal knowledge earlier now, the thought hit me I guess more a question, actually. But who owns this right? And particularly at the at the senior team level, who on an executive team should own this challenge?

Greg DeVore

We really define it as someone who is the knowledge champion, and people are like, Okay, well, how are we going to have time to do this? It’s a shift in how you work. So right now you have that person, you’ll have that person, that organization that is answering questions all day, they’re constantly jumping in to help people out. And they can never move to their higher priority task, because they’re just getting roped into things. So often. We call that being a knowledge spender. Every time they get asked a question, they answer every time a problem comes up, they solve it. They’re spending knowledge all the time, we want to turn them into a knowledge investor, so that instead of doing that, they’re going to create a digital guide that will solve this problem. But also the next 100 times that question gets asked, they’re going to be pointed to that. So that knowledge champion isn’t necessarily the person who has all the answers, but they’re in charge of rallied all the answers so that people can work independently. And we’re answering questions once, not 1000 times.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, yeah, it was so good. One of the things that I’ve found is common precursor to the dusty SOP syndrome, is that things like this get relegated to a specific part of the company, right? You have process people over here, or it gets sent to HR purgatory. So how do you make sure that it stays integrated into what you do as an organization as opposed to becoming the work product of some particular function?

Greg DeVore

You know, we weren’t. We were talks with one company, they had exactly what you’re describing, they had it kind of sectioned off into this. And they had these massive SOP that if you suggested a change to it, it took nine weeks for that to change. And I said, there’s no possible way anybody’s relying on this thing. Because if I have to wait nine weeks for a change, I’m just I mean, I’m, I got to do something, you know, in those nine weeks of doing that. So it’s very important that this is integrated across the organization. And a lot of what we do is work to bring training and operations into perfect alignment. Because you’ll have these situations where training is training employees, and they come out and operations get some and they can’t do anything. They’re basically teaching them from scratch after they’d been through training. So to keep it all aligned, it really gets back to that workshop of really defining what does this employee need to be able to do independently if they’re going to work in this role? Operations has to be it’s really that supervisor Who’s responsible right now for answering the employees question and fixing their mistakes. That’s the person that want to help change that behavior. So that they’re perfectly aligned with what training is doing, what QA is doing whatever other organization is, they have that single source of truth of what needs to happen. And they’re empowering that to happen.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. And how powerful to move your your managers folks in that role from that knowledge vendor, like you said, to a knowledge investor. It’s remarkable. It’s so honestly, it’s, it’s actually not that difficult to do. It’s a lot easier to say, but it’s just a matter of going in and doing it and sticking with it. And going back again, and again. Alright, so I have a question for you. I like to ask this of everybody. It’s this. If you were to boil it down, if you were to say there’s one secret What’s the biggest secret that you wish? Everybody watching or listening to this episode today knew? What’s that one thing that you want them all to know, and take away?

Greg DeVore

We can accomplish much more and be much more productive by memorizing less. So we always think we want to learn learn, learn, there’s there’s things we want to learn principles, we want to learn concepts, but factoids, detailed procedures, those things, that’s not going to create value, the less we memorize that there’s a great book called The Checklist Manifesto, talks about all the benefits that come from using checklists, checklists, because that gets that out of our memory. And it studies ers in the massive impact it has on healthcare, to use checklists or flight, you know, hexes, all those sort of things. But we still have ingrained in us that if I memorize this, I’m going to be more valuable. We’re actually more valuable if we learn to rely on guided knowledge. And so we’ll accomplish more of like memorizing list.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, that is so so good. I remember the first time I learned that it was from the great philosopher Shaq, he was in a competition. And they asked him I think about some kind of stat from his days, like basketball, I was like, I don’t know that they were getting honorable. I was like, Hey, I don’t memorize things that I can easily look up. And and I think that sums it up well, so I know folks are listening to this. It’s just revolutionary for that, right? They’ve got their managers that are beating their heads against the wall, they feel like folks are doing all kinds of stuff. It takes forever to get people on board. They’re experiencing every one of these symptoms that you’ve you’ve mentioned here. How did they solve it? Where can they go to find more out about you? Where can we get a copy of your book.

Greg DeVore

So if you go to findandfollowbook.com has a link to our book there or you can find it findandfollowbook.com, on Amazon. The book really lays out the framework helps you define the problem, get your whole team on board of what’s the root cause of what’s happening here. And then a recipe of applied. Now if you want more help, you can reach out to me I’m on LinkedIn, Greg DeVore there, the company I co founded is screensteps.com We’re happy to talk you through and those issues and and and help you figure out a solution to it.

Scott Ritzheimer

Oh, Greg, this has been a fantastic episode. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing the work that you do is massively massively important, never more than it is now. And so I just appreciate it. I appreciate what you’re doing. Thanks for being here. And for everyone watching or listening you know that your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did. And I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.

Contact Greg DeVore

In 2003, Greg DeVore co-founded his company ScreenSteps along with his brother. ScreenSteps is dedicated to helping businesses transfer knowledge to their employees faster. They do this through a combination of a software platform and a framework that guides organizations in reducing their reliance on tribal knowledge. This has resulted in onboarding programs that cut new hire times to proficiency from 12 months to less than 30 days. Greg co-authors the book Find & Follow: Reduce Supervisor Burnout & Improve Employee Performance by Transferring Knowledge Faster.

Want to learn more about Greg DeVore’s work at ScreenSteps? Check out his website at http://www.screensteps.com or grab a copy of his book at findandfollowbook.com

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