How do you train folks how to "reject"? [Friday giggle]

[SkyeHa]

truly, my users are an adorable lot. We implemented over 2 years ago, and the number 1 comment I've gotten in all this time is some variation on "I don't want someone to feel bad because I clicked on the Reject button." (either as a Task approval or as a Document approval) Does anyone else have gentle souls that they need to train in Workfront? I am about to have a couple dozen new reviewers for training and somehow I must convince them to be "mean" and reject as necessary. Does anyone have any good scripts? Useful phrases or philosophies? If not, I hope you at least got a good giggle out of this post. :) Happy Friday! -skye

[EricLu2]

Funny. Um, yeah, we had people who were very sensitive about that word "Reject". They took it personally and raised it as a problem. We changed the word from "Reject" to "Not Yet Approved". Those who were offended by the word "Reject" were well pleased and those not offended by the word "Reject" were nicely humored by the whole exercise. & #65533 ;& #65533 ;

[JamieHi]

For me the problem is not with the wording, but that it cancels out everyone else's approval! I'd prefer as Eric said a "Not Yet Approved" button that the user can recall after it's been pressed. Jamie Hill JLL EMEA

[WendyWh]

We have had similar conversations that led to a rabbit hole of trying to figure out our options for different messaging. Lucas, where did you change the wording? I'd love to dig a bit deeper and provide our team a solution. :) Wendy White AmeriCredit Financial Services, Inc. dba GM Financial

[tracy_fox]

Ah the souls I work with must not be of the gentle type as they have gotten quite used to "Reject". We use it in business cases approvals, document approvals and task approvals. The task approvals took a little longer to get used to, but for User Acceptance Testing we add this description to the Task: "Start UAT and as soon as an issue is found this UAT task should be rejected which will immediately log a general UAT Issue on the task. For each specific issue found during UAT, it should be logged on this UAT task as an independent issue (+New Issue). Once all issues on the specific UAT task are noted as closed (=Closed, or Resolved, or Won't Resolve), including the overarching issue of "Approval Rejected (User Acceptance Testing)", the Approval Process for UAT will again trigger allowing the approver(s) to approve the task moving the project forward" Since the user has an opportunity to log and fully explain their reasoning, it may make the rejection easier. For business case and document approvals, most times it is our senior/middle managers that are rejecting items they find do not meet their expectation so there seems to be little issue at that level. I think focusing on the reason for the "rejection" and the outcome afterwards as it is always a chance to learn and grow and this might be the best tactic for gentle souls. Tracy Fox Project Manager / Workfront SysAdmin Sykes Assistance Services Corporation

[BarryBu2]

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I had the reverse problem with one client. They had set up an approval path of 7 or 8 senior managers, all in sequence. It took a long time to work out the order in which they had to see it - Lot's of circles of Person A saying "I'm not looking at it until Person B has approved it" and Person B not wanting to look at it until they knew at least person A had approved it. Anyway, after working through all that they were trigger happy to 'reject' an issue. If they didn't see a date (that wasn't in the old paper form, and so wasn't a field on the issue) they'd reject it. A complex one with additional information in attachments? Reject it without opening the attachment because it didn't contain enough information. It took a long time to train them to use comments to send questions (or even speak directly to the PM) without undoing six prior people's approvals. Interestingly, one of the first things they did with comments was 'back date' their approval - that is, you'd have an approval time stamped on 15th July stating 'Approved 1st July'. That stopped after the first month when reports showed the actual time and the comment together. Barry Buchanan Work Management Australia

[MalisaLi]

We had to do some training around what the three buttons means in the creative approval process, and did get a few people say that 'Reject' seemed negative, but the way we framed it was like this: Approved (green): This is 100% approved as-is Approved with changes (yellow): I approve this after a few changes are made, but don't need to see another proof. Reject (Red): I have some changes and want to see another proof. This explanation has seemed to help for our reviewers. All it means is that the approver needs another proof in our case. Malisa Lieser Tennant