Daily workplace challenges have increased over the last decade, and today’s workforce is under pressure to get the job done better and faster than ever before. Productivity demands have heightened while the pace of work is accelerating. Yet employees arguably receive less hands-on support today than in the past. Managers are time-constrained and the ratio of employees to managers has increased. Also, with more employees working remotely, there’s inherently less opportunity for the spontaneous, hands-on guidance that more naturally occurs in an office or other in-person setting. Finally, with increasing burnout and work overload, co-workers have less time to support and advise colleagues.
Every employee faces daily challenges where receiving expert guidance in the moment of need is not only beneficial, but often transformative. We often apply labels such as performance support or personal effectiveness training to describe this kind of guidance. Regardless of the terminology we use, the essence remains the same. Whether it’s about bringing a mistake to a manager’s attention, resolving a conflict with a peer, or gaining the confidence to speak up in an important meeting, pragmatic, proven advice that can be immediately applied helps an employee proactively address their challenge with confidence and competence. As a result, the employer saves time and money in the form of increased productivity and better performance outcomes.
Employee performance support can come in the form of coaching, but human coaching, while effective, does not scale. Cost, consistency, availability and convenience are all significant barriers to scaling. SageX, Inc. found that human coaches support a mere 3% of the workforce, leaving 97% of employees in need of an alternative solution to get the support they need when they need it.
On the surface, it may appear that all those hour-long courses offered through the learning management system (LMS) can address the scaling issue and meet the coaching need, but traditional eLearning delivered via long-form course content falls short from both a content and format perspective.
To truly bridge the gap between traditional coaching and more automated, on-demand tech solutions, we need to embrace innovative educational tools that offer tailored, dynamic learning experiences and foster a more engaging, mentor-like interaction with the learner.
Learning in the Moment of Need
In a moment of immediate need, when in an ideal world they would turn to a coach, employees often don’t take the time to search through generic course topics on a destination platform like an LMS. This explains the lackluster learner engagement metrics associated with more traditional forms of eLearning. Today’s employees increasingly lean into their ingrained pathways of using apps on mobile devices to get the answers they need in the flow of their work. This behavior takes the form of sifting through dozens of Google links and screening multiple YouTube videos. SageX recently conducted internal research among 267 learners, which confirmed these behavior patterns. The problem with this approach? It takes time and effort to curate among all those blue links and unvetted videos to find the best approach, and despite their efforts, employees might still be left with uncertainty as to the right action to take.
The good news is that we can streamline and optimize employees’ efforts while simultaneously tapping into their ingrained digital behaviors and preferences. The key is to provide them with practical, proven advice in the form of short, engaging video clips, accessible via a user-friendly mobile app.
Approximately 80% of the workforce does not work behind a desk, and even desk-based workers may communicate more on their smartphones than their computers. The preference for video-based training content among employees is a well-documented trend. Video-based training not only leads to higher retention rates, but also offers a more engaging learning experience. What is less acknowledged is that employees are three times more likely to watch a video on a mobile device than any other device. Moreover, given that learners prefer to consume quick content that’s immediately applicable to their jobs, not just any video training content will suffice.
It’s essential to craft video training content that is not only brief and engaging, but strategically designed to deliver relevant, actionable insights for impact and efficiency. When done right, video-based training content results in a fundamentally different user experience when compared to more traditional training approaches.
This is not to say that there is no role for longer-form video-based eLearning. If an employee wants to learn to program in python or take a course to prepare for a certification in project management, longer-form courses accessed on a traditional LMS fit the bill. It’s simply that this kind of approach falls short when employees need help to solve daily workplace challenges where easily accessed, helpful advice makes all the difference to their productivity and effectiveness.
Traditional eLearning also lacks sufficient interactivity and personalization, resulting in less-than-ideal learning outcomes. A passive learning experience, where learners are merely observing rather than actively participating hinders absorption and application of knowledge. Ideally, learners have opportunities for interactive reflection and practice in the learning experience. Engaging with the material in a way that encourages learners to contemplate and then practice what they’ve learned is crucial for deeper understanding and skill development. In this respect, traditional eLearning, particularly in the domain of soft skills training, has fallen short. It often lacks mechanisms for learners to interact with the content in a meaningful way, to practice new skills in a simulated, safe environment, and to receive personalized feedback that guides the learning. Without these interactive elements, learners are less likely to translate theory into practice in real-world scenarios.
Providing employees with the right advice at the right time and in the right format can also yield significant returns on investment for the organizations that employ them. Companies lose billions of dollars every year due to miscommunication, unproductive conflict and ineffective approaches to problem solving. For example, on average, employees engage in conflict 2.8 hours per week and managers spend more than 20% of their time on conflict resolution. That translates to over $300 billion of paid hours that are filled with conflict instead of positive productivity. There’s a huge hidden cost to not providing employees with the everyday support they need to tackle workplace problems, but there are solutions available.
In Conclusion
Organizations can provide on-demand, scaled employee performance support to boost productivity and effectiveness by leveraging modern mobile training technologies. These technologies provide succinct, impactful video-based guidance, interactive simulations to enhance communication skills and reflective exercises to develop employee self-awareness of strengths and areas for improvement. Deploying technology that offers a multifaceted approach to technology-enabled employee coaching not only enriches the learning experience, but also ensures that skills acquired are both retained and practically applied, fostering continuous improvement.
