Boost Employee Performance And Foster Professional Growth With Targeted Training Content
When a company doesn’t have the technology or platforms in place to create and uphold a culture of learning, everything is harder: attempts to conduct successful new hire training, compliance training, and professional development all suffer as a result. When employees can’t access the resources they need on the job, or when they spend time taking training that’s irrelevant, it negatively affects how they view the company. It also drains considerable time and resources.
For that reason, it’s time to consider how your training delivery enables or hinders learning – both at the office, and in a remote work environment. The training and development delivery system, which includes all of the ways in which the system enables or hinders learning – can be considered the learning ecosystem within your organization.
How To Develop A Holistic Learning Ecosystem
By applying best practices from learning performance consultants, you can develop a comprehensive learning ecosystem that will deliver employee performance support, job aids, workflow tools, and resources at the right time, to the right employee, and in the right training modality. We see this system as a central hub connecting each part of the ecosystem together. Such a system can create the foundation and the scaffolding of your learning culture, enable a cohesive and relevant learning experience, and uphold your brand.
So, what training technology do you need to develop and support a learning ecosystem whether in the office or the remote environment? The first key to a learning ecosystem is a central hub. This is an employee development platform that is connected to each piece of learning your employees will use. This is an integrated system, which requires you to bring together analytics, aggregated platforms, and data feeds to effectively deliver training and resources.
Note that the learning portal, career development platform, and the resource tools should be interconnected to allow for a comprehensive, just-in-time learning experience that accurately facilitates the learning and support your employees need on the job.
Once you have the learning portal in place, there are a number of training assets and modalities that become viable. Microlearning – or the method of breaking up information into smaller, more easily digested “bites” – is a useful best practice for designing training and development content that integrates into your workflow and supports remote learning.
Remote Working In The New Normal: The Accessibility Issue
Depending on the goals of your initiative, some assets may be more effective than others. In a remote work setting, it is important to note availability both on and offline.
When it comes to novel additions to a learning ecosystem, there a few that have become more popular in recent years. Offline content libraries and toolkits have proven useful within organizations that have traveling technicians or salespeople. Now, they could be useful to a remote workforce as well. The ability to access content without being connected to the Internet or the company server is a technical challenge that’s often overlooked but is critical to overcome access and availability issues.
The way that content management platforms organize assets can also have a huge impact on content consumption. For instance, consider creating an index of subjects and terms, as well as related terms within a learning path. Accessibility and an intuitive learning experience are vital when employees are working remotely on training and development activities, as they won’t have the option to turn to a coworker, colleague, or leadership for immediate support.
The power to suggest additional assets based on individual content consumption data and with microlearning in mind will help to increase the knowledge base of your learning audience. A central hub for learning also provides a space for social learning elements. For example, a forum for sharing informal learning experiences like “lessons learned”, or informative videos on selling techniques would add a sense of community to the learning journey. Creating a sense of community is a valuable tool to keep your remote workforce connected, identifying with your brand, engaged and motivated.
An Example: New Hire Training And Social Support
Let’s consider how these assets might work for an employee on the job. A new hire, who we’ll call Adrian, runs into an obstacle on his project for a client but doesn’t know how to proceed. Instead of emailing a manager and waiting to hear back, Adrian goes to the company learning catalogue to find a solution. After a quick search, Adrian finds a resource that describes the internal processes for managing project timeline revisions. Then, the learning portal suggests reading a related asset that describes different project management models or navigating difficult conversations. The learning experience proves helpful, so Adrian shares the win on their department’s forum as an anecdote. This is a confidence building experience, builds community through information sharing, and ideally this also serves as a refresher for other new hires navigating similar challenges.
Social sharing is also key to creating a cohesive learning environment – and especially when your workforce is remote. When employees can share their learning with others through integrated tools, they are more engaged with the content and the system, contributing to a unified learning culture. A best practices forum allows you to capitalize on that engagement, helping your learners to develop targeted behaviors to make your organization succeed. Such a forum could include searchable case studies that showcase and deconstruct best and worst practices, empowering learners to replicate those practices and share them with their peers.
The Future Of Work: How To Improve Performance With Training And Development Content
It’s important to note: A best practices forum must be managed and curated to ensure that resources have a high quality, align with your brand, and are relevant to your organization. Of course, another key to a hub is the ability to track and score your employees’ progress toward their learning goals. Not only does AllenComm have incredible performance consulting resources to help you design exactly what you need, but we also have a team of technical experts. They work with you to create the technical aspects of the training and to record the data to increase your employees’ performance through a learning ecosystem that provides easy-to-access training. The hub personalizes experiences through core competencies, diagnostics that tailor learning,
and strategic timing that allows learners to access complementary training at the right time.
These tools can be used for new hire training, compliance training, and other employee training and development activities. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how employee mental health can be positively impacted using these same learning strategies and digital tools.
Download the eBook The Future of Work: The Role of Instructional Design In Converting VILT To eLearning In 2021 to launch a personalized virtual training program that engages every member of your team.
