“Organizations learn only through individuals who learn” Peter Senge ‘The Fifth Discipline’
The fact is no one wants to perform badly however it just happens because of lack of skills and knowledge to perform the particular job. The class room trainings and online learning can be extremely time consuming and at the same time not so effective. The personal on the job informal learning sessions can be inconsistent and expensive. With the addition of any new process or change of existing process leads to complete wash out on the efforts being taken by such methods, the pace of business makes it difficult for employee to keep up.
Organizations spent significantly to create learning content (job aids, reference materials, products manuals, operations manual, web based trainings etc.) for enhancing the knowledge and requisite skills.
Most often such content remains unutilized and unproductive, nicely situating itself in organizational document management system. How to solve this riddle of enabling the workforce with requisite skillset through knowledge transfer which does not results into boring trainings and yet help them when they exactly need it?
Having worked with similar situations where client from manufacturing industry has invested heavily into creating training content on large machine installations procedures and yet not able to actually help people on the ground floor. The biggest missing link in the approach was information delivery in Interactive, Visual, Guided and Modular way. The way exactly the employee would like to use the information which has been made available to him. The information rendered in a way which will make his learning and the job easy. Tablet based mobile application which covers the standard operating procedures (SOP) right from beginning of the task to completion in modular and interactive way would help employee to seek support exactly where he is facing issues, lookout for inputs about particular problem, watch video and the only part he wants to deal with now.
Mobile performance support apps let workers access content (hot spot based navigation) helpful tips, checklists, tools, process videos and other additional resources. Workers can be at the client side installing machines or performing any operation or can be on the manufacturing floor; mobile performance support is there to help them anytime they need. The recommendations to solve such performance support problems would be -
- Minimize Training: Don’t try to drag employees through hours of training or online learning, just give hand them over the Tablet with app covering your SOP. No need to give any introduction of an application as its kind of self-learning.
- Knowledge Transfer: Introduce changes and new process learning easily. Seek feedback from the employee about usage and usability of the application.
- Maintain Consistency: Focus on creating additional value to application and how can it be made more effective? What should be the part of learning content and how to map additional or peripheral processes? Reconnect with them about usability of the application in day to day life. Use the analytics offered for who is accessing what? Frequently faced problems etc.
