Feeling Good: Why Positive Relationship-Building is The Critical Outcome of WordPress Documentation, User Support, and Training

Kenzie (Presenter): Hello, everyone! I will start by acknowledging how much I wish we could be in the same room right now because a significant part of my identity is to make people laugh and think and it is hard to know if I have succeeded. In these uncertain times, as we navigate the new normal, are you willing to share your ideas? As you know, many are struggling. I will pretend that you think I am hilarious and if you felt generally drawn to letting me know how one of my incredibly dumb jokes landed with you, I appreciate it. It was nice to see your faces in the trivia.

I am here to talk to you about why relationship building is a critical outcome of your training and support and why it is all about feeling good. I feel strongly about this and I don't want to downplay the difficulty of it. It's, you know, a thing.

My name of course is Kenzie Woodbridge and my pronouns are they/them. I care about documentation and user training. I enact that care through the British Colombia institute of technology. I have been directly supporting our CMS users in using one content management system or another since 2004. I have delivered around a thousand hours of technical training. I have developed strong opinions about the topic of this talk that I am grateful to expound upon.

I am a nerd/academic whose primary research is community on online co-creative spaces. Where I work serves a lot of students through five campuses in many diverse programs. We run the gambit. We are using WordPress for multiple purposes and departments. Our primary use of it and the part I am involved in is a heavily modified form of WordPress. Our migration into WordPress is ongoing. We started a couple of years ago and it is taking time to achieve it. It is not just a matter of making something new. We have to move over our existing content, users, applications, and of course do our best to update and improve along the way. As we all know, that is more complex than creating something from scratch. We are at this point in the process. We are being pulled in a million directions. We are getting there.

Before I get carried away with details, I will tell you my plan for the talk. I would like to be organized today. I will break it down into three basic questions. Firstly, who or whom are we actually talking about? Relationships are vessels for people. Who are the people I am talking about? With whom are we building relationships? I want to answer the why question from the title of the talk. We will answer that to the best of my ability. Then, bonus content, I guess. I am kidding. There will be strategies on how to do the thing if I have managed to convince you it is important. All the way through I have song lyrics from songs about feeling good.

Starting with whom. Are the groups involved in your website? To be fair, I don't know. I will tell you what our environment looks like. At BCIT we have been working on this since 2004. We work on the infrastructure and tool process. We have a large group of folks that are responsible for content on their own section of the website. We have a cohesive feel across the website but they are responsible individually for their content. I will divide these people into three broad groups.

In development, we have technical infrastructure, ensure security, and all of that stuff. They are very important. We have back end developers who are working on the applications, modifying WordPress and maintaining WordPress. We have the front end designers and developers who make it all look good and function in the way it is supposed to, be responsive, have those accessibility features built right in. That is one group.

The second group is content community and support. That is support for the content and support for the community that is maintaining the content. That includes the people who get the phone call if someone goes wrong or someone can't figure out who to use the tool. That includes a trainer. That is me. I don't write all the documentation by I try to coordinate it. We all need to be writing coordination. That is one role in there. We have content strategists, writers, and people who can give really good advice on managing content.

The last group is our web content community. They are the creators and managers of content and our market strategists. That is the content owners and the leadership folks who are responsible for making sure that we have a vision we are trying to communicate with our website.

Those are the groups I will talk about. Now, hey, Kenzie, aren't you forgetting our website users and perspective students? Yes, these people are the reason we are doing all of the things. But, they are not the people that I will focus on today. When I am talking about users for most of the day I am talking about users of our content management system and the relationships we are building as a web content developing community. Then, more specifically than that, where are these opportunities for these relationships to be the critical outcome. It is really us in the content community support grouping most commonly and with our web content community. That isn't to say that none of the other possible relationships here matter. They are all important. But, this is the focus of what I am going to be talking about.

Let's get into the meat of this!

I am going to assert to you that the primary propose of training, documentation support and such is not just information transmission, skill building or problem solving. If I want to assert that, I need the receipts, right? It is a very complex multi faceted thing. Let's do our best to get into it.

Why is it critical? A positive relationship, and I will start with a because that has nothing to do with our websites because we as workers matter. Our experience of our work lives matter. However we try to think that our work selves and private selves are separate, they are not. Whatever problematic or strategic advantages these positive relationships may offer, they are also contributors are our overall well being and those things are important enough in of themselves. I have added a wonderful paper on this topic. I encourage you to give a read. I can also refer you to Mr. Rogers. The relationships we have with people matter a lot.

Less you worry that this is getting too sentimental. Let's settle in with pragmatism. Relationships are important because they increase your ability to influence and persuade. Right?

Positive relationships build trust and being trusted means you will be in a better position to make an impact on decisions that will be made. People are easily persuaded by those who they have a good relationship with. People are less persuaded by people they don't like. There is a false autonomy. Would you rather be right or liked? I am not here to make friends kind of thing. That is false. If they don't like you, they don't care that you are right. They won't listen to you be right and they are not going to be influenced by you to do the right thing. This is another reason why positive relationships are very important. Once again, Mr. Rogers also agrees you will note, with this statement.

Another "because" is that positive relationships with people and the feelings they bring are transferrable. This is the concept emotional advertising is based on. Please associate this baby with the thing we are selling so you feel more positively about it. Here is the thing. They already even though I am talking about positive relationships between human beings in terms of the people you are supporting and using technology they are already a little bit inflating you with the tool you support. I know this because in addition to the work we do with our website, I also support our social internet at our school. It was not at first popular. I have been to many meetings where people would complain bitterly about it and then turn to me and apologize as though I were the software they were insulting. I am not. My point is that if they have a positive relationship with you, it will help them to have a more positive relationship with the tool. That matters because the tool is how they get the work done and the fewer barriers there are, the better it is.

Positive relationships last longer than technical fixes and skills. If someone calls you up and they have a problem and you are abrupt and you fix it, okay. But that fix is going to probably come up again or different one. If you develop a positive relationship, it supports them coming to you when they need a technical fix.

This is tricky and counterintuitive. In particular with training, the primary outcome is absolutely relationship building. It is not information transference or skill building. I wish it was. Honestly, maybe it is a bit ego driven, I believe I am a good trainer. But I have a good memory. I have seen the same people come through training multiple times and I have given them training several times. Every single time they say they have never thought about that before. But I know they have, because I told them it a previous time. The things that are outside of their regular everyday work, they don't remember. They are essential to us but I promise you they don't remember it to the same extent. If they have a positive relationship with you, they will have a positive relationship with your documentation that you can introduce to them in training. They are more likely to return to those things and be able to repeatedly acquire the technical skill when they need to then if they don't have that positive relationship.

Actually, all of these things are sort of specific but also positive relationships support many other of our desired outcomes. I will tour this. As people that are trying to make a website for a propose, we have things we want to happen out of that. We want user satisfaction. Our website users standards need to be met.

One way of meeting their needs is making sure the content is correct, current, and accurate and up to date.

Likewise, it is compliant and meets our accessibility guidelines and it is not broken in any way. It works.

Also, overall, it is a coherent experience. What I am really talking about here is it is desirable for users and helps to satisfy our users if the information they can find is tied together coherently. They go to a website and they can navigate it in consistent ways then that is important. That is another important desired outcome to support satisfied users piece.

In addition, we would like to have community confidence. For most of us, we want the people updating content being able to do so and they don't need to come to us every time they need to fix something small. There is too much content and too few of us, generally. We need the community to be competent. Our support requests need to be manageable. They need to fit within the capacity that we have. That is another desired outcome.

Those last two fit in a concept we are thinking more of lately. It is not just our technical system resilience but also our people relationship resilience. Technical resilience is something we have all thought about for many years. They are doing more construction on campus and they need more power lines and they take down the whole south of campus, we want the campus to fall over the right places. If they declare a global pandemic and we all need to suddenly transition to online and home, we need our relationships to be resilient so we can continue to maintain the website and make everything still happen.

These are desired outcomes. Positive and good relationships support all of these outcomes one way or another. As I say, when I say user satisfaction, I mean the relationships we have with our content community and leadership. When I am talking about a content coherence, positive relationships will reduce the incidents of rogue sites where people don't like the options available and they don't want to deal with IT so they make their own site. It is not secure and it doesn't meet privacy regulations and things like that. Positive relationships can contribute to all these outcomes.

The last thing I will say in my list of "becauses" is that a positive relationship is sometimes the only thing you can achieve in the moment. It is the only thing that might be under your control. Sometimes the servers are down. Sometimes we are having a global pandemic. Sometimes people don't remember things. You know? There are lots of things beyond our control. But the positive relationships we build with people are sometimes the only thing we can do and it is a good thing to do.

Sure. But, how, right? I briefly considered doing an extremely silly jokey transition where I pretended that having satisfied the "why" question I would just end. Then I would pretended to be surprised and bring out a whole new slides. Then I realized that as a bit it is not that funny and it may stress out the organizers. They have all been great. Third, there is no guarantee that anyone would ask me to continue talking. I will transition smoothly into this part like a normal presenter, which I have already ruined. Anyway!

I think in many ways if there is a shift to make in your work, it comes from realizing that relationship building is possible or could be advantageous and then just deciding to do it. I am not here to patronize you. You are smart people who have also been in the world for awhile. I am sure you already know a bunch of ways to strengthen your positive relationships with your users. I don't want to waste your time to say things like "being friendly" and I never want to be the dude that says, "smile more."

I will offer up a few guiding principles I have found to be helpful. It is more scattered than a 101 would be. I hope you will bear with me. I have been told that being earnest is my super power. If any of this comes cross to you in your slightly more jaded circumstances as corny or insincere, I can't help it. This is genuinely who I am.

Let's do this thing! Although I have been mercenary and pragmatic when talking about relationship building, it is important to remember that the relationships you are building are real. I am not talking about being fake. The relationship is real. The propose of the relationships is to work together effectively and make things better together and achieve a common goal. Maybe it goes without saying, but I wanted to make sure I did note that.

Something that helps with that is to hold on to the idea that your shared work is important and evolving. It matters. You can really on the engaging and interesting work that you share and that can carry many a good working relationship. You may need to be a bit of a dork and acknowledge in public that you do care. That can be a stretch if you are out of the habit. If you care about accessibility, you need to demonstrate and model that caring. It helps to assume that people would be your allies in this if they just knew enough about it. Right? Never to assume that they don't care. Assume it is an information problem rather than a values problem. Right?

That is that.

Next is a break from my head long plunge from earnestness. I will make a nitpicky thing about word choice. It is the word "intuitive." You keep using this word and I don't think it means what you think it means. I think you think it means easy to use. It has obvious controls and just makes sense. Unfortunately, intuitive is a very subjective word. It could mean all of that to you and that user over you. But to the user that has been trying to accomplish a single task all morning and then finally come to you for help, then intuitive means they will be shamed and feeling incompetent or you don't know what you are talking about. Intuitiveness is very subjective. That is literally all that it means. Intuitive can be a real barrier. I highly recommend you get rid of this word from your vocabulary along with words like, "it is so simple and easy" when it really isn't.

Nothing is intuitive, easy, or laughably simple. That leads me to my next thing. It is this.

We are going off in another direction. Oxytocin and adrenaline are antagonists. What does this mean? The quickest possible endocrinology review. Adrenaline is the hormone that your body secretes when you believe yourself to be in danger. Oxytocin is the hormone is sometimes called the "love hormone" or watching media or all sorts of things. It is very important in relationship building. It increases our capacity for empathy in the moment when we have oxytocin. It enhances our ability to get information. They are antagonists in the body. We can produce one or the other. We can't produce both at the same time.

Why is it important to keep this in mind? If you are trying to train somebody, if you don't set up the learning situation to be safe for them to make mistakes and accepting that mistakes happen. If you set it up in a way that is accidentally judgmental or there is negative consequences and people get called out for making mistakes, you are not setting up a learning environment that is conducive for learning or for positive relationship building. It is important to put people at ease. You will have more success if you make space for people to make mistakes. I always start off my training sessions by telling people that I am aiming this directly at your level, the level of I have never done this before and I don't know anything about it. I want them to know that you are here and I am drawing you in.

I always think about this. This is true about you. You are not necessarily good at relationship building when you are secreting adrenaline, stressed out, in fear for people in your life and all sorts of things. You may have a hard time connecting with people. Maybe you could give yourself a break from that and do something else. I think about this principle all the time I highly recommend holding this in your head as you go through your work.

The next one is to talk about trust. I talked about how positive relationships help people to trust you. Trust requires integrity and integrity requires honesty. I have here that you are not the tool and you don't need to defend the tool. I have seen a lot of real success with building relationships with people and building up their confidence of being overly critical when things are broken in our tool. Don't sugar coat it or try to pretend it is not a problem. The difference between people that are comfortable with technology and people who aren't comfortable with technology is not even a skill difference, it is whether they know enough to know where to place the blame. If people don't know enough to know when it is the fault of the tool, they always blame themselves and that puts them into the adrenaline stress "can't get into it" place. The people that know to blame the tool are in a place where they can learn. They can figure it out. Don't be afraid of calling out the thing if it is a problem. You can build a fair amount of trust with people by being unafraid of speaking truth of the thing when it is broken. [Laughing.]

Finally the last thing I wanted to say is that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. Be very careful that you don't enter into situations thinking that you are the expert and they are the person that is there to learn from you. You are an expert on the tool, but they are an expert on their content, their students, and an expert on their programs and their whole experience of what the thing is and what the student needs are. They are the people that are talking to the parents on the phone to help them understand what is going on. Remain open, remain curious and don't think you are the only person that has something to add. We are all experts on things.

That is what I have to say about that. I have one last slide. I would be uncomfortable if I gave this whole talk and failed to acknowledge that part of what I am advocating for here is a form of emotional labor. If you are unfamiliar with the term, emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expression for the job. It is a form of caretaking. We know that historically and currently and those who provide emotional labor tends to be genderized and racialized. You will notice there is similar distributions of the roles in our organization. Some of the same people that I am suggesting will benefit from this positive relationship building may also be genderized and racialized in the same way. It is visible where I work.

I sincerely believe that building positive relationships in your communities is a benefit to you. It is useful and instrumental to our work to build those relationships and it is therefore, part of our skilled workload. It is important work that benefits everyone. Like everything else in our workload, we need to take care that we are distributing the work equitably and compensating it.

That is my talk. That is what I have for you today.

Thank you.

Eric (Room Host): Kenzie, thank you so much! We have one question already queued up in the Ask A Question tool. Attendees, if you have questions for Kenzie, use the Ask a Question further down the page. We have just under eight minutes or so. We will try to get through as many as possible.

Kenzie, the question I see so far is . . . how do you keep that cohesive feel of the website while allowing folks who access tools? Do you let them use the page editors where there can be user styles?

Kenzie: We have a pretty locked down system. We don't use the block editor in WordPress. We are using panels. The panels we have built have styles built into them. There is not as much room for people to go wild with their creativity. One of my lines from training is that I am here to crush your creativity. It is a joke, but also kind of true. We are wanting them to work within the constraints of the system as we have built it.

In order to do that, we need to have the cred of giving them a decent looking website. Otherwise, they would understandably do more. Sometimes they will want to do it more anyway because that is human nature. People want to make things. They are creative. We have been doing this for so long we have those traditions to rely on which makes it easier to enforce than it was say, ten years ago. I hope that answers that question a bit.

Eric: Thank you very much.

We have an additional question. That is why I leave room for typing. I know I need to craft the perfect question when I am writing one. The question is can you give an example of how you have made a positive relationship with someone that is reluctant to learn or participate?

Kenzie: There is a bunch of reasons why people might be reluctant to learn or participate. Actually, a pretty recent example is we have had to pivot to doing all our training online. Most of our training was in person before. I was finding it useful to be in the same room with people. Remember when we could share physical space, that was great! We are now pivoting people not just assigned to do the work but also can navigate zoom and do those sorts of things. There was a department where the person they wanted to do the thing was really uncomfortable learning online and didn't have things set up. I got together with them a couple times before the training session to get them set up. They didn't have two monitors. How will you watch the demonstration and do the thing? We figured out they could use their kid's iPad to watch my smiling face. Had they ever connected to the VPN? No. Going through those things, which are not the things I support, but to show that it matters to me that they come in and get the thing that I know there is pressure on them to get these skills but they are really uncomfortable. Now the pressure is off. They have the skills they need and they have the access to do the thing. If not, like if I just said, go to the Help desk and they will help you figure it out it wouldn't have been the same getting them into it and getting them ready for the tool. I wouldn't have been able to take all the benefit of that into now they are in there doing the tool. It would have been easier for them to keep pushing it off and those sorts of things.

Eric: The last question was about someone that was reluctant to learn. What do you suggest doing if you feel a relationship has gotten off on the wrong foot? Or how can you work to repair a poor relationship?

Kenzie: Sometimes you get off on the wrong foot. That happens. It is a good question. It really depends on the circumstances. In some cases, let's just acknowledge. Some relationships are not necessarily fully repairable. Maybe this person and you are just going to get up each other's nose every single time. That is just your fate. Right? In some cases, it makes sense to refer them to somebody else. You don't need to bend over backwards to fix every relationship as long as you are not the only person that can have that relationship. If you have to work with this person and figure it out, some of those conflict resolution skills are the ones where sometimes you get along with people and it feels like you don't listen to you. That is usually a reflection that they don't feel like you are listening to them either. You can display curiosity. What are their needs? You reflect back their needs to them. This is an important point. If you understand, we tend to think that is enough. I understand you and I am fine with that. We need to demonstrate that we understand it to them. They need to experience our understanding in order to build that relationship back up. They need to hear back some of the reflective listening stuff that you understand their concerns. It needs to be demonstrated. That is another way of thinking about it. You are talking about a kind of conflict. Right? Yeah. I am not sure if that answers the whole question.

Eric: I have one more question for you. We have an attendee ask about FAQ pages. They find that folks jump to calling or emailing the person without checking the FAQ. It is a failure of our FAQ website. Do you have any insights or thoughts on how we can approach that?

Kenzie: I definitely do. It is a success in regards to relationship. This is one where you need solidarity. The weakest link is getting all those calls on this. You all need to tow the line on this. Kindly and gently push people to the documentation first. Kindly, firmly, fairly every single time. If you don't do that, then you don't develop their relationship with the documentation and you don't make that the first part of contact. It is so easy sometimes because you think you could solve it for them. If you made the documentation, you want them to be able to access it even when you are unavailable. If someone comes to me with the problem I send them the link to it. I ask them to go through it and if that answers their question, great. If it doesn't answer their question, call me back. I can't be the only one doing that. It has to be everyone doing that. People don't want to have to do this thing. I know it seems counterintuitive that I am saying to don't help them and push documentation. Boundaries are important in relationships. I don't think it is inconsistent. Part of setting boundaries is pushing them to documentation now.

An FAQ page may not be the right resource. Maybe you need to collect that up into smaller chunks that are more obvious and concrete rather than having it be a big FAQ page. A consistent approach of pushing them to the documentation first is my main suggestion there.

Eric: We are right at time. Thank you for your informative session. I have so much homework to look at this.

Kenzie: Thank you!