Office Computing 101
If you find your work time increasingly taken up in helping your less computer-literate colleagues, perhaps you should consider teaching a class. While it means more work in the short-term, the result can save you many hours over the long term.by John Tyler
If you have gained a reputation among your colleagues for being "good with computers," you've probably found yourself thrust into the role of office guru. This means that not only do you have your own work to complete, but you spend part of each day at coworkers' desks trying to sort out this or that problem. In most cases, the tasks are trivial ó showing someone how to choose the proper laser printer, how to indent a series of paragraphs, or how to copy a file to a floppy ó but they eat up your valuable time.
For almost half a year after joining my present company, I was the office guru. I helped, encouraged, assisted, and cajoled my coworkers into making better use of their machines. But I found myself having to stay increasingly late evenings to finish my own assigned work. My bosses noticed, too. While they were grateful that I was attempting to make the office more computer literate, they were unhappy because my work and time management were suffering.
There were some alternatives ó hire an expensive trainer to put the staff through its paces, or give up and let the others go it alone ó but none were terribly appealing to the company managers. So they fudged it off, and I stayed on call as computer advisor. Finally, in desperation, I decided to offer my own solution, one that you might want to consider: in-house computer training classes.
Before you dismiss this as sacrificing even more of your personal time for The Company, stop and consider. This could actually be the most time- and cost-effective way of getting back to your real work and having coworkers up and computing. In the end, it will save time, impart some basic skills to the rest of the staff, and please your shacho (The Boss).
Setting up in-house classes
If the thought of "teaching" scares you, it shouldn't. You'll just be doing the same kind of thing you do every day when you help coworkers individually, only this time you will have a larger audience and a structured flow. Even if you don't consider yourself a computer whiz, what you know ó what you consider the minimum basic knowledge for sitting down in front of your monitor and doing good work ó is miles beyond what your average coworker knows. And imparting any small bit of that knowledge will bring immediate results.To get started, make up a class schedule for three levels of computer users ó Beginning, Getting By, and Working Well ó and route it around the office so that people can sign up. (You'll find that most people, when evaluating themselves, will be conservative, with most of the group opting for the first two sections.) At this point, leave the curriculum vague, promising only "an introduction to speedier ways of working with your computer."
When your "students" have signed up, based on what you know of your coworkers, you will be able to judge what topics each class level should include. If you do the training in English, you'll also have to consider each coworker's English ability; plan accordingly.
Next, set up a class schedule. You've got three groups ó give them each three hours of instruction, one hour per week. For example, put Beginning on Monday, Getting By on Tuesday, and Working Well on Wednesday. In a Japanese office, you'll probably have to do the classes after work, say from 7:00 to 8:00, as such training usually falls into a category deemed "non-essential." But as you'll see, it will be worth it. Don't get carried away with details at this point ó just go with the basics. As you prepare your classes, keep in mind that the main objective is cutting down the time you have to spend showing others how to do relatively simple tasks. Based on past experience, you know what questions people ask you most often, and what bottlenecks they encounter in the course of their jobs. Design your lesson plans accordingly.
Getting ready to begin
By the time you're ready to begin classes, you'll have decided where the classes will take place. Ideally, there should be computers clustered close enough together that you can scoot from one to another to see what each student is doing. If there is a whiteboard handy, use it for sticking up screenshots of the desktop or dialog boxes.If you're working with Japanese employees, you'll find another use for the whiteboard: you'll have to spell out many terms. When I was helping coworkers at their desks, the biggest frustration was that, no matter how many times I repeated a command like "drag" (as in, "drag that file here"), they often couldn't understand it because either they weren't familiar with the word or didn't know the spelling. When you're dealing with jargon, spelling it out can save untold minutes of repeating yourself.
Another important point in which a whiteboard can assist is to introduce the differences between the two languages. For example, in English I usually refer to "hard disk storage" and "RAM"; in Japanese, these are called "haado" and "memori." (In our office, everyone backs up to a Plover MO drive and disk, which is usually called "hikari disuku" in Japanese. But the staff ó and the salesman who sold it to us ó know it only as "plovaa.")
With the planning all done, you can begin the classes.
Week One
For the Beginning class, start with the basics: turning on and off the computers (some have buttons on the keyboard, some switches at the front or back), shutting down peripherals (always after the CPU), and rebooting (in case of a crash). In my classes, while everyone knew how to turn on their own machines, many didn't know how to turn on someone else's machine (the switch was in the "wrong" spot), and most didn't know how to restart following a crash. (Don't bother going into the causes of a crash at this point; few students will remember, and fewer still will make use of that knowledge.)Beginning students will also benefit from a global look at the basics. If you work on Macs, cover the desktop metaphor; if Windows, the File Manager. Demonstrate how to navigate around the computer ó everything from using different printers to connecting to another server. And briefly go into computer architecture (for example, what and where the hard disk is, or the difference between a floppy disk and a floppy drive).
At the end of the class, briefly recap all that you have covered, adding a little theory along the way. All students are as interested in the "why" as much as the "how." You'll find that, when discussing computers in general ó as this first week is designed to do ó each group's knowledge differs little. In a typical office, even users who are "Working Well" are doing it only within their job-specific software. Some are Excel or Lotus power users, or whizbangs with Filemaker or FoxPro, yet they may know little about the computer environment these packages are working in. In a Mac or Windows environment, there are universal procedures for operating your computer, separate from specific software commands. Teaching a handful of these procedures will make everyone that much more comfortable with their machine.
Week Two
Begin week two with a quick review of the previous week's material. (Japanese "students" remember well their school days and take copious notes; they will expect you to review, and will probably surprise you with their retention.) After the review, move into the software. Discuss commands that are similar between applications (this is especially easy in a Mac environment) and tasks that resemble each other, like printing. Stress that there are different ways of completing a task. Many computer users will have discovered only one way to perform a task and don't realize that alternative ways exist. Emphasize that while whatever works is okay, there may be other, less burdensome, routes.Stick to the generalities during week two. If you start getting into application-specific techniques (like mail merge in Word, or building spreadsheets in Excel), you'll lose half the class's interest and probably only confuse the other half.
Week Three
Week three will start with another review. Move the Basic group up to what was covered in Getting By in week one (this gives the classes continuity and structure, and releases you from the burden of creating new material), and shift the other groups into question and answer sessions. In my groups, the students had picked up enough in the previous two weeks to see several related problems they wanted to ask about ó or better, make their own guesses about how to solve.The results
After the third week of classes finish, you will begin to notice the change. Coworkers will still call to ask questions, of course, but these will often be to confirm their own ideas of how to solve their problems. And the calls will come less frequently. Soon a week will go by without a single call. You're free!You will have invested about twelve hours of your time (nine hours teaching and the rest in preparation and answering questions after sessions). You may well have cut down your trouble-solving time by that much within just a few weeks, though. Now, months later, I have saved much more than those twelve hours, and people are working happily at their machines.
There may be side benefits as well. In my case, the shacho, who now appreciates better what computers can do, has okayed my PowerPC upgrade and this year's software wish list, with hardly the bat of the eye. That was certainly worth twelve hours of effort.
