The Golden Age of the Admin with Shannon Gregg

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dr. Shannon Gregg, Ph.D., MBA, and president of Cloud Adoption Solutions. She’s also the author of It’s About Time, a book about refocusing on the things that you think are really important.

Join us as we talk about how work has changed since COVID, why it might be the Golden Age of the Admins, how to start getting out there as a speaker, and much more.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Shannon Gregg.

Work-life integration.

2020 and 2021 saw a lot of changes to how many of us work. “No more is it work-life balance, it’s work-life integration, and I think that’s exciting,” Shannon says. Everything was changed around very rapidly to enable people to work from home, but now we need to catch up on what that means in the long term.

“Now that people aren’t returning to the office in droves, we need to ask how we can make sure everybody has what they need to do that in a way that is sensible and flexible as their roles continue to change,” Shannon says, “at first it was just access, but now it’s optimization.” One good thing to come out of how long the pandemic has extended is that we’re not simply turning the lights back on and getting right back to it—we’re dipping our toes in the water and reexamining how much time in the office is actually necessary.

The Golden Age of the Admin.

One thing Shannon thinks admins need to learn how to do in a world without SABWA is to be more proactive to get inside of their users’ experiences. Screen sharing is a powerful way to get inside of a workflow and really figure out what’s going on, and it’s become much more of a normal thing in a work-from-home environment rather than something that might come across as intrusive or overstepping.

“I think now admins have the ability to say, ‘I’m going to take this bull by the horns and give you something you weren’t expecting because you didn’t even know it was possible,’” Shannon says, “and that to me is amazing because I feel like now we’re in the rise of the Golden Age of the Admin.” She has some great suggestions for how you can get a broader view of how your entire organization is working together to figure where you can create new efficiencies. This especially includes the kinds of things we tend to put off because they don’t seem essential, especially security.

How to get started with public speaking.

Shannon has been doing a lot of speaking, and her advice, if you want to get out there, is to make sure it’s something you’re really passionate about. “For me, that’s always been that user adoption is driven by thinking like or interacting with the user,” she says, “and great technology isn’t great if nobody’s using it.”

You need to be able to put your ideas out there without the fear that someone is going to disagree with you. “It’s not about me as a person, it’s about the topic,” Shannon says, “and being able to segment those things is a challenge that’s really worth doing.” Engaging in a spirited debate is a positive thing because it helps you expand your perspectives and think about a topic from all sides.

There’s so much more in our conversation with Shannon, so be sure to catch the full episode to hear all of her amazing insights.

Podcast Swag:

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Links:

• It's About Time: How to Do More of What Matters in the Time You Have by Shannon Gregg
• Kids interrupt dad's live TV interview

Social:

• Shannon: @ShannonJGregg
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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