After some time has gone since your familiarity indication, you might want to refamiliarize yourself again. Use cases for this include:
You can refamiliarize yourself with roles and skillset. The button for refamiliarization appears on the role or skillset assignment page, if there is more than 30 days since you last updated your familiarity with one of the expectations.
One you click the "Update your familiarity" button, you will be brought through all and any expectations where the last time you updated familiarity is more than 30 days ago.
Ensuring that people grow and remain familiar with policies, responsibilities, skills, etc is one of the great operational challenges of an organization. And the more often there are changes in people, roles or expectations, the more challenging it becomes to keep expectations and familiarity in sync.
To address this challenge we allow for people to communicate to which extent they are familiar with something. We refer referred to as familiarity.
Familiarity provides us with a more effective and efficient way of identifying and updating people's understanding of, belief in and comfort with something.
We find familiarity to be a great indicator of to which extent a person can realistically be expected to to comply with expectations, and a useful way of communicating the levels involved in reaching an operational and value-adding state.
When someone indicates their familiarity with something, they are prompted to select from one of four levels. These are:
Here's an example of familiarity indication in the context of a system:
The familiarity levels builds on top of one another. That means that if you indicate that you are Comfortable, you are also expected to Understand, and if you indicate that you are Automated, you are also expected to be Comfortable.
As a leader (or any person having expectations of someone else, for that matter), consider the fact that we can't realistically expect people to predictably meet an expectation unless they have indicated that they are Automated.
When familiarity data is aggregated and reported on, it is reported as two percentages:
The percentage is calculated relative to the context.
You'll usually see these indicators appear next to eachother, in the form of two progress bars:
The awareness percentage indicates if any familiarity has been given (regardless of level), whereas the familiarity percentage takes the explicit familiarity level into account.
The point of distinguishing between the two is that we want to focus on building awareness of expectations first, and then later focus on improving familiarity levels where neccessary.
Read more about how to explore familiarity.
The overview of the familiarity information type describes which specific information types that support indicating familiarity (in the "Outgoing associations" column).
You can also identify if a specific page supports familiarity by whether or not the familiarity icon appears on the right hand side of the subheader.
When you have indicated your familiarity with something, the icon is replaced a familiarity indicator indicating your current level of familiarity:
People sometimes confuse the platform concept of familiarity with the platform concept of proficiency (the latter being related to skillsets).
It makes sense to distinguish the two concepts like this:
Communication of familiarity is done via the familiarity panel. From this panel you can:
When !ddocs, the panel is automatically opened. To open and close the panel manually, click the familiarity indicator icon in the top, right corner or use the keyboard shortcut f.
The familiarity panel answers the following questions:
At the top, you can see the level of awareness and familiarity for this piece of information. The awareness bar indicates if people have indicated any form of familiarity, wheres the familiarity bar indicates how familiar people are.
The percentages are relative to the people who hold roles expected to be familiar with the information.
Next comes a list of the people who have indicated their familiarity, including their level of familiarity. Hover over the individual familiarity indicators to view any additional notes given by each user.
If you have indicated your own familiarity, it is displayed at the top of the list:
If there are any people who have roles which are expected to indicate familiarity, but have not done so yet, you can see those people by scrolling to the bottom of the panel:
The primary motivation for indicating familiarity is to keep up with the expectations of the roles assigned to you.
The easiest way to do this is to click the purple "Indicate your familiarity" button which appears in the upper, right corner of your Focus dashboard whenever there are expectations associated with your roles with which you have not indicated familiarity.
You can reach your Focus dashboard by clicking the Wecomplish-logo in the upper, left corner.
When you click the purple button you are taken to the first expectation with which you have not indicated familiarity.
In the top, you will see a familiarity indication section. The left column is for indicating your familiarity, whereas the right column explains why you are expected to be familiar with this piece of information, and your overall awareness of role expectations.
If you want to focus on building familiarity with a particular role, select the role in question from the right column of the Focus dashboard...
...and click the purple "Indicate your familiarity" button in the context of the role:
If you want to indicate your familiarity with an individual role expectation, navigate to the role in question, select the expectation type in the right column, and then click the particular expectation in the left colum.
You can identify which expectations types have missing famiiarity by the first progress bar in the right column being less than 100%, and the expectation in the right column having no familiarity indicator.
For a detailed understanding familiarity, please review Familiarity as a concept and the Familiarity panel.
A piece of insight does not have to be a role expectation for you to indicate familiarity with it.
If you want to indicate familiarity with a random piece of insight, navigate to the page of that insight and trigger the Familiarity panel.
When indicating familiarity, you are only required to select the familiarity level. However, you are encouraged to reflect on and fill out the comments field explaining what's keeping you from reaching the next level of familiarity, as well as deciding on whether you would prefer mentor assistance with improving your familiarity.
Completing these two extra pieces of information makes the familiarity indication vastly more useful both for yourself and your coworkers in identifying the next step to improving your familiarity.
Exploring familiarity can be done in multiple contexts depending on which question you are looking to answer.
If you want to know who is familiar with a given piece of information (and how familiar they are), navigate to that piece of information and open the Familiarity panel.
If you want to know the level of familiarity of pieces of information relative to their siebling, select the "Familiarity" view type in the view type dropdown.
This will display the awareness and familiarity of each individual item, sorted in ascending order first by awareness, and then by familiarity.
The familiarity view type is supported when viewing:
If you want to know how familiar all role holders are with a given role, navigate to that role, scroll down to the "Role holders" section and examine the progress bars located there.
If you want to know how familiar a specific person is with a specific role, navigate to their role assignment.
This can be done either via navigating to that person and their list of roles:
...or via the role and the list of role holders.
If you want to know how familiar a person is with (1) a specific role expectation or (2) a type of role expectations, navigate to that role holder via the person or the role.
If you want to know how familiar a person is with all their role expectations, navigate to that person and examine either their familiarity with (1) overall role expectations or (2) specific skillset expectations.
If you want to know how familiar each individual is with role expectations, navigate to the organizational Familiarity report (Organization > Reports > Familiarity).
If you want to know how familiar the entire organization is with expectations, navigate to the organizational dashboard.
In order for familiarity to be truely useful it needs to be exposed in the context of expectations. That's what the Training view is for.
The training view provides a birds eye view of what a person is expected to familiarize themselves with in order to meet the expectations of a role or skillset, including the progress of that familiarization.
Use cases include:
To access your own training view, click either the "Roles" or "Skills" link in the left hand side navigation, or select the role you would like to train on from the right hand column in the focus view.
You can access the training view of others by searching for that person and clicking the "Roles" or "Skills" links in the left navigation.
Role training is the primary training type, and allows you to train and communicate familiarity in the various expectation types associated with a role.
Allthough skillset training is also a part of roles (provided that the role expects the given skillset), skillset training is also its own thing. This is relevant for those cases where you would like to train in a skillset which is not (yet) required by any of the roles you hold.
Clicking the name of the role or skillset will bring you to the training view. In the context of a role, the training view might look something like this:
In the right column there is a navigation with the different types of expectations associated with the role/skillset, and a percentage indicator displaying your awareness and familiarity for that type of expectation.
The color of the indicator is red between 0% and 33%, yellow between 34% and 66% and green between 67% and 100%.
In the left column there is a list of the specific expectations, including their associated familiary level.
Clicking the name of an item will take you to that piece of content with the familiarization panel open so you can update your familiarity.
Clicking on the purple "Indicate your familiarity" button will take you to the next expectation for which you have not yet indicated your familiarity.
You can see how recently someone has updated their familiarity with their roles, skillsets and individual expectation types in various places:
Indicating familiarity is usually done in the context of role or skillset expectations.
However, you can also update your familiarity with singular pieces of information not neccessarily expected by a given role or skillset.
To update your familiarity with a given piece of information, trigger the Familiarity panel and click the "Indicate your level of familiarity" button, or update the existing familiarity indication.
As a leader or experienced worker, you know that there is a lot of different information which others in your organization would benefit from being familiar with. By making it more clear who is expected to be familiar with what, we can more easily ensure that the right people are exposed to the right information.
Most often the expectation of being familiar with something occurs in association with a role, meaning that we expect a person holding the role to be familiar with certain aspects of the role.
For instance, we might expect someone who is a project manager to be familiar with the responsibilities they are expected to practice, the processes they are expected to contribute to, the risks they are expected to mitigate, etc.
In other cases, we might have particular expectations of certain individuals to be familiar with a particular piece of information.
The platform supports both these use cases, by providing two ways of setting familiarity expectations both for roles and individuals.
Setting familiarity expectations for a role consists of dictating which roles are expected to be familiar with a given piece of information.
This is the preferred method of indicating familiarity expectations, as it will ensure that both existing and future role holders will be exposed to the expectation.
In order to request familiarity via a role, add the roles you would like to be familiar with the information under the "Relevant for" section in the right column of the piece of content.
Requesting familiarity via roles does not produce any specific email notifications to role holders, but rather assumes that users are utilizing the Maintaining familiarity with expectations functionality in order to remain up-to-date with role expectations.
In some cases, you might want to specifically request familiarity from individuals. Use cases include information which does not require familiarity from a given role, but you still want a particular person to be familiar with it.
When you request familiarity, an email is sent to that person. The email contains a link that will take them to the relevant context where familiarity can be set.
To request individual familiarity, open the Familiarity panel, click the "Request familiarity from someone else" button and fill out the form that appears.
When the invitee changes the state of their familiarity, a new email is sent to the person who requested the familiarity notifying them of their familiarity level.
In some cases, you might want to specifically request that someone update their familiarity. Use cases include
When you request an update to familiarity, an email is sent to that person. The email contains a link that will take them to the relevant context where familiarity can be updated.
You might wonder why requesting updates to familiarity isn't triggered automatically by the system.
The reasons for requiring individuals to trigger this manually are:
You can request familiarity from individuals in the following contexts.
If you would like to request familiarity from the people who hold roles which are expected to be familiar with the information, but have not yet indicated familiarity, trigger the Familiarity panel and click the orange bell button in relation to the header "Missing familiarity from".
If you have made significant updates or changes to a particular expectation, it's useful to allow the people who have already indicated their familiarity to familiarize themselves with the updates.
Whenever you edit a piece of information with which people have already indicated their familiarity, you will be prompted whether or not you would like to request a familiarity update from those people.
You can also trigger a familiarity update request manually by opening the Familiarity panel, clicking the "Request an update to familiarity" button and filling out the form that appears.
When you request an update to familiarity, an email is sent to everyone who has already indicated their familiarity requesting them to update it.
If you want to request a familiarity update from a single person, click the allipsis in association with that person and select "Request updated familiarity".
If you would like a person to update familiarity to all the role expections with which they are not 100% aware, navigate to the focus dashboard of that person and click the orange bell button in relation to the "Training and development" heading.
The button only appears if there are role expectations with which the awareness is below 100%.
If you would like a person to update familiarity with their expectations in focus, navigate to the focus dashboard of that person and click the orange bell button in relation to the "Expectations in focus" heading.
The button only appears if there are at least 6 days since familiarity was last updated for any of the expectations.
If you would like a person to update familiarity with the expections of a specific role expectation with which they are not 100% aware, navigate to the role holder view and click the orange button with the text "Request missing familiarity".
The button only appears if there are expectations with which the role holder awareness is below 100%.
As leaders and managers, one of our key responsibilities is to get the best out of our people.
In order to to so, we need to provide them with the training, priorities, and support they need in order to grow and excel in their roles and deliver their best work.
However, executing on this responsibility can pose a lot of challenges:
In order to make it easier to follow up with the people who report to you, the platform provides the My team support view. The goal of this view is to help you answer the question "How can I best support you?" for each of your individual team members.
You can reach the My team view by clicking the Wecomplish logo, and selecting Support Others > My team in the left column.
For each person in your team, you can find a card containing information on how to support them. Here's an example of what a card might look like:
The card is divided into three main sections relevant for reflecting on how to best support that person:
What to expect/look for:
How to act:
What to expect/look for:
What to expect/look for:
Central to the use of the Wecomplish platform is understanding and contributing to the different insight types that can be stored within the platform.
As a result, whenever you're looking to improve your ability to use the platform more effectively and autonomously, it makes sense to focus on improving your familiarity with the different insight types you're expected to contribute to.
To uncover which insight types you're expected to contribute to, navigate to your profile and click the "Explore" button in relation to the Platform box.
This will display the "Only mine" view of the Overview-page, meaning you will only see the insight types the given user is expected to contribute to.
The insight type a person is expected to contribute are those with a light blue background, and where you, on the right hand side, can see either an indication of current familiarity, or an indicator showing that familiarity is missing.
If the insight type is light blue, but the right hand side is empty, the person in question does not have a role in which they are expected to contribute to this information type (yet).
Read more about the Overview-page and how it works here.
To improve your familiarity with a particular insight type, click its name, bringing you to the full view of the insight type.
From here, there are several different options you can choose from in order to better understand how the insight type works.
In order to produce a predictable structure, there are predetermined rules dictating which insight types can be stored under which, and how they can be associated with oneanother.
Read more about how the insight types relate to eachother under the subheading "Understanding the relations" on the Overview-page.
In the white, middle card, there is a "Content" block showing three examples of the insight type published within your organization.
Click one of the items to explore it,or click the "Browse all" button to view more examples.
Reading the documentation of an insight type is a great way to better understand the intention and value of managing a given piece of insight.
Provided that the insight type has an associated documentation page, you can find it by clicking the "How to contribute" button on the white card.
When you feel like you have a conceptual overview, there's no substitute for getting your hands dirty and trying it out yourself.
You can play around with an insight type by publishing, editing and deleting it, either within on of your own teams, or by creating a sandbox team in which you can experiment with diffent insight types.
One of the most common reasons why expectations are not met is because they are not properly understood.
To help identify expectations that are ambiguous, fluffy, confusing or just plain old difficult to understand, the platform implements the concept of unclear expectations.
When Indicating familiarity, the user can check the box indicating an unclear expectation.
This will result in a question mark icon appearing in relation to the familiarity indication, wherever it is visualized.
In addition, unclear expectations are exposed in various views and context throughout the application.
To review which expectations a particular person considers unclear, navigate to that person and click the "Unclear expectations" link in the left navigation, in the "Support me" group.
This will display all the expectations marked as unclear by that person, grouped by type of information.
In order to more easily discover if a person has expectations they consider unclear, the amount of unclear expectations is displayed on their support card.
To review which expectations are unclear within a given team, navigate to that team and click the "Unclear expectations" link in the left navigation, in the "Reports" group.
This will display all the expectations belonging to that team that have been marked as unclear by one or more people.
In order to more easily discover if a team owns expectations that are considered unclear, the number of unclear expectations is displayed on the team dashboard.
To review unclear expectations at an organizational level, navigate to the organization and click the "Structural capital" link in the left navigation, under the "Reports" group.
This will display all unclear expectations divided by team, including links to the unclear expectation report of each individual team.
Most of us have lots of development potential. The indication of familiarity helps expose this fact, but can also make it feel overwhelming to get started improving ones familiarity ("Where do I start?").
In order to make the development process more tangible, better aligned with others perception of our potential and to enable us to better prioritize, the Platform uses the concept of expectations in focus.
Think of expectations in focus as providing you with a method for addressing the concept of people working with themselves in the context of a role. You can hear this referred to in day-to-day chatter as people saying "I'm working on that" or "He really needs to work on that".
With focus we can signal which specific expectations (be it a responsibility, a skill, etc) a person is expected to prioritize their development efforts towards. Put another way, we can communicate which expectations a person is expected to improve their familiarity with.
Focus can be set by the familiarity holder themselves, or by another person suggesting something that that person might benefit from focusing on.
There are two ways in which you can set something in focus:
To set focus on an expectation navigate to that user, make sure the "Expectations" tab is selected and click the "Add expectation" button.
This opens up a search field in which you can search for the expectation you would like to be put into focus.
Start a check-in. When you get to the expectations step, click the "Add expectation" button.
This opens up a search field in which you can search for the expectation you would like to be put into focus.
Navigate to the expectation.
If you want to set the expectation in focus for yourself, click the pin-icon to the right of the familiarity indicator. Click again to disable focus.
If you want to set the expectation for someone else, toggle the familiarity panel and click the focus indicator corresponding with the person you want to focus on it.
Please note that this way of setting familiarity only works if the person has already indicated their familiarity. If the person has not indicated their familiarity yet, you can work around this by first setting the familiarity expectation for that individual, and then set focus on that expectation.
To prevent the expectation of focusing on too many things at once, a person can only have 5 expectations in focus at the same time.
If you attempt to set items in focus for a person who already has 5 items in focus, you will receive a warning and focus will not be set.
In order to view which expectations a person is focused on improving, navigate to the Focus-dashboard for that person. The expectations in focused are displayed under the "Expectations" tab of the Priorities-section, which is visible below the Plans-section in the left column.
To review the focus of multiple individuals at the same time, use the Focus report.
In the beginning, it can feel foreign and difficult to identify which things to put in focus. Consider using one or more of the following methods for identifying relevant expectations:
As you grow more familiar with the expectations in focus feature, so will your intuition for discovering and pinning expectations whenever you realize that there's something you would benefit from improving your familiarity with.
As a reminder to keep checking in with and reflecting over the expectations you have in focus, a purple play button appears at the top of your expectations in focus whenever you have one or more expectation with which you have not updated your familiarity the last 7 days.
Click the button to be taken through each pinned familiarity indication older than 7 days.
You can also use Check-in (one-on-one) to ensure that you maintain focus on both your expectations and other priorities.
The first time someone completes indicating familiarity with all the expectations of a specific role or a skillset, an email notification is sent out to key stakeholders.
The purpose of the notification is two-fold:
For role familiarity completion, the following people are notified, if specified:
For skillset familiarity completion, the following people are notified, if specified:
The role list and single role view for a person includes charts indicating how that person is developing over time. In the context of the Platform, development is measured as a change in familiarity with role expectations.
There are two charts indicating changes in awareness and familiarity respectively. They are displayed at the top of the role list of a person, and at the bottom of the single role view of a person.
Each chart has two Y (vertical) axis.
The left axis corresponds with the purple line and displays the score over time. This number is always expected to grow unless someone deletes or downgrades their familiarity.
The right axis corresponds with the green line and displays the percentage over time. This number will increase when familiarity is set/upgraded and drops when additional expectations are added to the roles assigned to that person.
We could all benefit some guidance and well-meaning nudges in order to progress in our roles and better master a skillset. And it's not neccessarily always our leader who is the best fit for this job.
To produce this type of social support and accountability, the platform implements the concept of mentors.
A mentor is someone who aims to provide someone else (the mentee) with intellectual and emotional support in an attempt to improve their understanding of and familiarity with a given role or skillset.
In order for the mentor/mentee relationship to work properly there needs to be an awareness of the relationship and regular communication between the two parties.
A mentor is responsible for helping the mentee, by:
In turn, the mentee should:
A mentor can be allocated to any specific role or skillset assignment of a person.
To assign a mentor, select the role/skillset in the training context of a given user and select a mentor in the right hand column.
If you check the box "Send notification", an email will be sent to the mentor notifying them of the mentorship expectation and linking them to this documentation in order to improve their awareness of the mentorship concept.
A list of the roles and skillsets a person is mentoring others in is availble under the Mentorships menu item.
If you require outside assistance in order to improve your familiarity with something, check the "Request mentor assistance" checkbox when indicating familiarity.
This will result in a life ring icon appearing in relation to your familiarity indication, wherever it is visualized.
Mentors can easily see which mentees require assistance (and for which expectations) from their mentorship overview.
For roles invested in making sure that there exists an network of mentors to help and produce accountability (CEO/insight manager/training and development manager), there exists an overall mentorships report. The report is only accessible to platform admins.
To view the report, go to Organization > Report > Mentorships.
Here's an example of a report:
Use the report to ensure that:
In order to make sure that familiarity data is presented quickly, and to report on Development over time, a persons awareness and familiarity with roles is cached. The cache means that a persons familiarity with roles does not have to be calculated with each page load.
The cache is used the following places:
The cache is automatically rebuilt when:
There are cases where the cache can grow outdated. Most commonly this happens when new expectations are added, and none of the automatic triggers for cache rebuilding has occured since.
Outdated cache can most easily be recognized on the Roles-list of a person, where the left column list of roles is uncached, and the right column list is cached.
If you suspect that the cache is outdated for a given person, you can manually trigger an update of the cache by clicking the refresh icon in the right column of the Focus-dashboard, or in the Role familiarity report.