Keep Your Business And Employees Happy
The old phrase "time is money" has never been more important than in our current climate.
We understand that time is precious for everyone. Everyone has never-ending to-do lists, and team leaders feel stretched and often overwhelmed. This is why when you and your colleagues take time out for learning, it needs to be valuable, and every moment needs to matter.
Here at Kineo HQ, we fully empathize with all these problems and more. This led to some important questions we must ask ourselves:
- How can we help save learner time with effective and efficient personal development and training programs?
- How can we still ensure each session is valuable and purposeful for both the individual and the company?
- How can we reduce seat time and still achieve everything we want to achieve and ensure we're engaging our learners?
There are many factors to consider here, but let's put a spotlight on the 3 main approaches we think you should consider.
1. Streamline The Content
An obvious starting point is to keep it short—most training is too long, so get into the discipline of focusing on the content you really need and leaving the rest to one side.
- Link out to additional materials: Focus on the key ideas in the formal training, then link to additional materials for more detail.
- Microlearning: Create bite-sized chunks of content on specific topics.
- Situation mapping: This technique matches the performance goals you need to achieve to the learner personas of your audience. This will help uncover the barriers, training, and support needed so you can focus your solution to meet your goals.
- Increase rigor on the commissioning of projects: If stakeholders can't articulate their needs in specific terms, push back on whether they are ready for your team to develop a solution or not.
Recent data from Fosway's Digital Learning Realities report shows that shorter, more bite-sized learning sessions are more popular with learners. This is important for companies to consider when building their curriculums. Perhaps setting aside half a day a month for training isn't a good approach, and 10–15 minutes a day could prove way more effective and captivating for the learners.
2. Personalize
As designers, we need to remove complexity and focus on what matters. This is about combining modern UX principles with learning best practices to create digital content that has maximum effectiveness. There are some simple approaches you can take to personalize your learning content:
- Upfront diagnostics to define learning paths: Give learners the opportunity to test out or adjust the pathway to help them focus on what is needed.
- Role-based learning paths: Offer different content to different audiences or multiple pathways through the learning. We recommend using content filters, like a role selector or assessment option.
- Personalized feedback with Performance Scorecards: A Performance Scorecard allows learners to practice decision-making in context. It shows how a learner makes decisions when needing to balance several potentially conflicting priorities.
- Branching scenarios: Create branching scenarios that challenge them to make decisions and then present the consequences. Each consequence can produce a new challenge and decision to be taken by the learner.
3. Increase Perceived Value
If you can increase the perceived value of learning to employees and the wider business, you effectively reduce the perceived cost, and therefore, you'll find less focus on reducing time spent on learning.
- Include stories, scenarios, and case studies: Provoke curiosity and get people thinking by leading with stories in which they apply their situational judgement in a safe environment.
- Collect and act on data that demonstrates efficacy: Use data analytics to gain deeper insights into the competency of your learners and the effectiveness of the learning.
- Embed content where it's needed: Bring learning into the workflows and social spaces where your employees are spending their time.
Shaping The Future Of Learning
Kineo helps the world's leading businesses improve performance through learning and technology. We're proud of our reputation for being flexible and innovative, and of our award-winning work with clients across the world.
Originally published at kineo.com.
