How Scribe makes it quick and easy to support your colleagues in the workplace 

Let’s say you’re making a presentation for a client and wondering how to pitch the idea effectively. You discuss it with your colleagues during the coffee break, and someone offers an excellent suggestion that saves your day.

We all want that. 

Supporting colleagues in the workplace is crucial to being a great team player. Successful teams solve problems together, brainstorm ideas and mentor new employees. Helping each other at work also builds rapport among team members.

But does it mean it’s easy to be supportive all the time? Sadly, no. Hectic work schedules and remote work environments make it pretty hard to help your colleagues. 

What if you could overcome these challenges? With the right tools in place, you absolutely can.

Let’s see how you can overcome these challenges with Scribe’s help.

• How to support your team at the workplace
• Benefits of helping your coworkers
• How Scribe helps you overcome the challenges in helping your colleagues
• How to use Scribe to help colleagues — with examples
• Final thoughts: Supporting colleagues in the workplace using Scribe

How to support your team at the workplace

1. Share your skills and experience.
2. Help new employees settle into the team.
3. Create useful resources for your team.
4. Offer answers to your coworkers’ questions.
5. Appreciate and encourage your coworkers.

It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. Here’s what you can do to support your colleagues in the workplace.

1. Share your skills and experience

If you're a long-tenured employee, you likely have a wealth of organizational knowledge. Sharing your knowledge will help your colleagues to do their work efficiently, and even make your own life easier. Just like you, every member of the team is good at something, like problem-solving or decision-making. 

Team members can support each other by sharing their expertise. It helps the team:

• Solve issues faster.
• Make smart decisions.
• Adhere to the organization’s process and policies.

2. Help new employees settle into the team

Every new employee goes through some anxiety at work. According to the Harvard Business Review, onboarding can make or break a new hire’s experience. In addition to a company’s formal onboarding program, onboarding buddies can help warm up new employees.

Supporting new colleagues in the workplace has many advantages. It can:

• Make them feel welcome.
• Help them navigate through initial hurdles.
• Enhance their productivity. 

3. Create useful resources for your team

Everyone comes across helpful information as they carry out daily tasks. Documenting that information will help your whole team. You can convert these quick tips and efficient processes into: 

• Job aids.
• Instruction manuals.
• Quick reference guides.
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs).

These knowledge-sharing documents will save your colleagues from reinventing the wheel, thus improving their productivity. However, creating documents frequently can become a time sink if you don’t have access to knowledge-sharing tools like Scribe — which lets you document processes in a few minutes.  

4. Offer answers to your coworkers’ questions

Let’s say a colleague has just started working on your project, and you have the skill set to guide them. Offering timely answers to your colleagues’ questions will help them settle into the project faster.

Answering your colleagues’ questions will build trust between team members and create a positive work environment. 

5. Appreciate and encourage your coworkers

O.C.Tanner’s global cultural report observed that 87 percent of employees feel their organization's recognition program is stale. It shows how crucial it’s to create a culture of appreciation within the team. 

Showing interest and providing positive feedback to your team members will improve their morale. While it helps your colleagues perform better, it’s also a great way to build relationships. 

We’ve seen how you can help and support your coworkers. Beyond just getting the work done, it has many benefits.

Benefits of helping your coworkers 

Here’s a quick rundown of the benefits of supporting colleagues in the workplace: 

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Without a doubt, we all love helping our colleagues and reaping the benefits. But even if it seems like something you can just do, sometimes it isn’t that simple. 

There are barriers to helping colleagues in the workplace that may prevent you from stepping in and offering that much-needed help. But don’t worry, not everything is doom and gloom. You can bypass the hurdles with Scribe.

How Scribe helps you overcome the challenges in helping your colleagues

Scribe is a knowledge-sharing tool that helps you convert any workflow into a step-by-step guide. It’s designed to empower team members to help each other. With Scribe, you can:

• Quickly create a visual guide to answer questions.
• Help your teammates to learn processes faster.
• Fill gaps in any formal training programs.
• Overcome the challenges of informal training in the workplace.

Let’s dive into the most common challenges that may dissuade employees from helping in the workplace — and how Scribe’s excellent features help you overcome them. 

Challenge #1: Collaborative overload

When you constantly help your coworkers get their job done, you probably won't have enough time for deep work, which affects your productivity. 

As a result, you’ll need to work overtime, which might lead to burnout. According to a Robert Half survey, burnout is one of the top three reasons for job changes in 2022. 

You might find yourself exhausted when:

• You need to explain things repeatedly.
• You’re trying to explain complex concepts/products.
• You have to spend hours creating knowledge-sharing material.

You also need to consider the time for context switching. After a knowledge-sharing session, it can take up to 25 minutes to refocus on your work. And it adds up quickly.

So how can you ensure helping others doesn’t take so much time?

Scribe makes it easy to explain things

Do you find yourself explaining the same process or answering a specific question again and again? Scribe is the perfect solution to convert any process into a step-by-step guide. You just need to walk through your process once and record it using Scribe.

Here’s a fun fact: An average Scribe takes only 54 seconds to create. So, you can help others without sacrificing your time or productivity. 

Challenge #2: Hybrid and remote teams

Seems like the trend that started with the 2020 pandemic is here to stay long-term. According to a Buffer survey, 72 percent of the 2,000 surveyed employees work from remote or remote-first environments. 

Helping your colleagues in a remote setting is challenging due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. It's also pretty common to face connectivity and coordination issues when collaborating over online meetings. 

How Scribe helps you make engaging material for remote learning

Scribe is designed to make remote learning fun and easy. Scribe has many features to create an engaging step-by-step guide. For example: 

• Explain the process step-by-step using screenshots.
• Make the guide engaging by adding tips, alerts and gifs.
• Easily share the step-by-step guides.
• Offline access to the guides. 

Challenge # 3: Lack of knowledge-sharing culture

The company culture has a significant role in cultivating knowledge-sharing among team members. There are two primary organizational cultures:

• Clan culture — team members help each other and have great learning opportunities.
• Market culture — colleagues compete with each other and hoard knowledge. 

The organization’s hierarchical structure also challenges knowledge-sharing within teams. It discourages junior employees from approaching managers or senior employees. Asking for help might be seen as a sign of incompetency in some organizations. 

How Scribe helps you create a culture of knowledge-sharing 

Even if your organization doesn’t have a knowledge-sharing culture, you can take the initiative to build one. Using Scribe is simple and fun, so it’s easy to develop a habit of making knowledge-sharing documents. 

It will only take under four minutes to download and make your first Scribe. Creating a culture of knowledge sharing has never been so easy. 

You can also share your guides through many channels, including:  

• Email the link to your colleagues.
• Embed in online tools like Zendesk, Notion and SharePoint.
• Export to PDF, HTML or Markdown formats (comes with the Pro plan).

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You can also create comprehensive knowledge bases using Scribe Pages. The Pages feature allows you to collate multiple Scribes, videos, images and links into a single document. 

How to use Scribe to help colleagues — with examples

Now that you know how Scribe helps you overcome the challenges of supporting your colleagues at the workplace, let’s see some examples of use cases for Scribe.

You only need a few simple steps to start using Scribe:

1. Purchase a Scribe Pro subscription (any browser or desktop) or sign up for the freemium plan (any browser).
2. Download the Scribe Chrome extension, Edge add-on or desktop recorder. 
3. Capture your workflows through the browser extension or desktop app. 
4. Scribe will automatically convert your workflow into a step-by-step guide.

Here are two examples of what a Scribe can look like:

Scribe #1: Teaching your colleagues how to use Zendesk

Let’s say your team uses Zendesk to manage customer issues. When a new member joins, you’ll need to explain how to create, merge and assign tickets. 

Instead of explaining the process every time someone needs to learn it, you can walk through the process once with Scribe and convert it into an engaging step-by-step guide.

And if you have several processes for one tool or project? Scribes newest feature, Pages, lets you combine Scribes with text, video and more in longer process docs. Check out this Page we made to help kickstart a Zendesk user. It combines several Scribes — including the one above!

Scribe #2: Helping your colleagues connect Zoom to Calendly

Your team uses Calendly to manage your schedules and Zoom for online meetings. You notice a colleague often finds it difficult to locate the link to the Zoom meetings. 

You can help your colleague by creating a Scribe that explains how to connect Zoom and Calendly. It’s that simple. 

Final thoughts: Supporting colleagues in the workplace using Scribe

Supporting colleagues in the workplace leads to better productivity and the team’s success. It also builds rapport among team members. 

While helping colleagues at work has many benefits, you might also find many challenges. Lack of time, unfavorable organizational culture, remote work environment and an absence of knowledge management systems might prevent you from helping your team members. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Scribe is specially designed for teams to help each other quickly. With Scribe, you can reduce the time you spend documenting processes by 93 percent and improve your team’s productivity by 25 percent. 

So, are you ready to create your first step-by-step for your colleagues using Scribe? Try it today; it’s absolutely free.