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And we're almost at the end of the first month of 2021 (sounds scary, I know)... wanted to start a quick thread to get a feel:

What did you learn over the course of the last month and this new year with your team and Guru?
To start, I learnt that onboarding new folks with Guru is driving usage, and is encouraging old timers to add and use material more. When we gave a new employee access weeks prior to their start date, they were MUCH more prepared to understand our product, teams, and more. It sounds obvious, but we doubted it would work since it's a ton of info to take in.

Well, it worked! :slightlysmilingface:

I also learnt that we have a random Collection filled with people's favorite recipes!
Looping in a few folks to the thread... share your thoughts!

@jess392 @chrissy @katie.vermilyea @aberman @crojewski @chrisanderson @siobhan @gabriel @allie.sokoloff @laura136
I agree, my new hires are very engaged with viewing and using Guru cards. I also took an idea shared here and send a weekly Guru newsletter with the top adopters each week. I noticed the newer hires and my Knowledge Council folks are always at the top of that list. Harder to get usage out of more tenured folks who "know" a lot about our business in their heads.
That's fantastic @zev and @kfretz! In helping to lead a change management effort with a number of new (and updated) processes in our go-to-market motion, I learned that there are a lot of Guru cards that need to be updated to reflect the changes accurately, and several new ones that need to be created. And that it's critical to document changes and share out w/impacted teams to help ensure the changes stick and are well understood and adopted.
We will be bringing on a new hire in the next few weeks using Guru as our primary training documents. Really looking forward to her feedback on this and hope that it's useful! :crossed_fingers:
Good thoughts @zev. One of the things I learned this month is actually a challenge that I'm not sure how best to tackle. A lot of people benefit from using Guru and employees generally value Guru a lot. That said, only a small fraction contribute to it by their own initiative. This month, I heard that one of the reasons for this is that some employees feel that dedicating time to writing Guru cards would take away time from their regular job. Since writing cards is not in their job description or its promoted as an important activity by company leaders, it's hard to get employees to write cards without me asking (most still do it if I personally ask).
@gabriel I think we all struggle with that! 😆 Wonder if anyone else has ideas
@gabriel @zev I also find I have to ask for the most part. But what I have been finding is the "authors" start to see how much more engaged the teams are with their info and can easily circle back to it (instead of trying to find an email). Took time, but starting to see them truly find it more valuable so they are willing to write the cards. That said...I have also said that any follow ups provided to my Sales team has to be in a form of a Guru card (no powerpoints, no emails), so the presenters have no choice but to get it in Guru :slightlysmilingface:
It doesn't directly solve the challenge, but I've found putting a card request queue workflow in place to be really helpful in making sure the need for a card is logged in one central place. If you can get people to take the small action of flagging a post in Slack or Teams as knowledge that should be documented in Guru, that's an important first step. Then turning those requests into properly written cards becomes a separate challenge, but one that's more manageable from my experience if you get the first part right (crowd sourcing card requests into a central queue).
@chrisanderson We do that with the Guru emoji, but it works like 10% of the time.
We're also creating Card Champions for each team and entrusting those folks to handle their team's content. It's an experiment, let's see how it goes.
People use the reacji 10% of the time or 10% of the requests actually get turned into cards?
I use the reacji 100% of the time (and wish others would too), and only 10% of the requests are 'carded' in Guru.
Ah gotcha. Any accountability expectations or incentives in place for authors to monitor the queue channel regularly and turn requests into cards? Curious if anyone's tried gamifying this piece, and somehow rewarding and celebrating the authors or groups who create the most cards from their respective queues 🤔
I like the gamifying idea but leadership still needs to champion that part. Essentially show to employees that spending time writing Guru cards is worthy of being admired and promoted at the company. Hard when leaders are so focused on the immediate bottom line, instead of the process-driven long term bottom line.

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