If the recent changes to our work environments have taught us anything, it is that when being faced with a challenge, we can rise to it. Thinking about learning in particular, before COVID-19, we often saw hour-long courses to help us learn how to work remotely, how to keep engaged, how to use a certain software or tool. But all of a sudden, we have to know how to do these things, and organizations adjusted on the fly and started to curate more content on the above topics instead of building new courses from scratch. Companies started to look at what communication tools they already have available and pushed out content accordingly. In all of this, it’s extremely important though to not just start pushing out content and start using tools to easily connect remotely, but to also think about the strategy behind all of this, and hopefully, keep up this new way of working once we’ve fought off this pandemic.

Learning in the flow of work

One strategy to consider in this new age is learning in the flow of work. Workflow learning differs from traditional L&D approaches. Traditionally, we often overwhelm employees with heavy content pieces focused on knowledge transfer either in eLearning modules or hour-long workshops. Learning in the flow of work however, puts the employee in touch with the right resources at the right time and right place. Workflow learning is designed to really drive business outcomes and performance, and focus on the learner. There are a multitude of ways to achieve learning in the flow of work. From using tools already available in an organization, such as Microsoft tools and apps, think MS Teams, Yammer and SharePoint, to integrating outside resources, such as LinkedIn or Twitter to help create community.

Collaboration as one key to workflow learning success

Another way to create community and allow employees to learn in the flow of work is collaboration. This refers to collaboration within a team, a project team, an organization, but can also mean collaboration outside of an organization. We see lots of collaboration happening right now. Within organizations, teams have virtual coffee breaks to connect and brainstorm ideas. Outside organizations, individuals cast a bigger net within their industries to come up with innovative ideas to help fight COVID-19.

Interestingly enough, when asking different people about collaboration, we see different definitions:

• Collaboration happens when two or more people work constructively to create a result that extends beyond the limited vision of each individual. (Steven Bleau, Instructional System Designer)
• Collaboration is the powerhouse of behavior change. Any collaboration in learning should give you the chance to gather new ideas/thoughts/concepts, test your ideas on others, and build something that is better than you could build on your own. (Vanitha Krishnamurthy, Sr. Learning Experience Designer)
• A group of two or more people working together by contributing a variety of inputs including ideas, discussions, and files to achieve something greater than if they’d done it individually. (Renee Brisson-Khan, Instructional and Learning Experience Designer)
• Collaboration goes beyond working together in silos to achieve an end result. It requires a team that is open to input and ideas of others for every element of the product to ensure it is not representative of just one individual, but of the team. (Katherine Hill, Instructional and Learning Experience Designer)

What does collaboration mean to you?

What’s common in each of these definitions though is that there seems to be a bigger purpose that collaborators work towards in order to achieve lasting change. This is very powerful and we would act amiss if we didn’t integrate collaborative aspects into everything we design! As people collaborate, they organically learn from one another through mindfulness, watching and listening to others, and reflection. Circling back to the main purpose of workflow learning, help drive performance, it is easy enough to see why collaboration should have its place in learning.

What is your definition of collaboration and how would you build it into your L&D programs?

About the Authors

Bianca Baumann

L&D professionals are often still order-takers. Employees don’t know how to do something, so organizations use training as a Band-Aid to fix it all. Training solutions offered are often eLearning modules that don’t consider what happens before and after taking the course and don’t provide performance support that would allow the learner to retrieve content at the moment of need. L&D creates a world that doesn’t resemble learners’ everyday lives.

Meaning, if we want to learn something new, we often use YouTube. Let’s say you want to learn how to change the tube in your bicycle tire. We watch a video on YouTube; we try it out. We fail initially because we missed a step. We watch another video, or read up on the topic to see the step-by-step instructions. We try again. We improved our performance but are still not 100% able to finish the job.

We watch another video, pause, and rewind and hit play again for the parts that are a bit tougher to master. And voila, we are able to change the tube in our tire. When we have to repeat this task a couple months down the road, there is a pretty good chance we will have to look up the steps again, because we’ve only mastered this once and haven’t had a chance to repeat the task for a longer period of time.

Our learners are in the exact same boat. Unless they do a task every day, they need learning experiences that they can draw from to improve their performances. Here’s how to create learning experiences that mimic how people teach themselves in real life.

Map out a learner journey.

Instead of building out eLearning courses that learners access once, focus on the learner experience and map out what the learner journey looks like. Think of an onboarding program, for example; the journey doesn’t start the day new hires enter through your front door. It starts the moment they apply for a job. What knowledge can you transfer early on about your organization that will make a difference once new hires are sitting at their desk? Think along the lines of culture and values. You wouldn’t create an eLearning module to tell your applicants about who you are as a company.

Instead, interweave your culture and your values into the overall process through a short video message, email writing, or telephone greetings. Once candidates are hired, you might reiterate your values through a fun exercise such as speed dating (getting a chance to talk to one person from every department in a span of 60 minutes) or an arts and crafts activity (building something that represents the organization’s values). Creating learning experiences that stick helps ensure your values will be remembered more easily.

Create a learning experience for complex topics.

For topics that go deeper, such as the software that your staff is using, leverage different resources that learners can access at the moment of need. Instead of simply giving learners five simulations in which they can practice certain steps in a safe environment, create multiple resources. You could use a short video to explain certain steps at a high level.

Then, learners watch their buddy go through the same steps when they are on the phone with a client. Next, they use a flowchart to follow the steps in a sandbox before they use the software for the first time on a live call. And, of course, they always have the flowchart available, should they need it. On top of that, learners will start creating their own resources by simply asking their peers, writing down notes, and sharing tips and tricks. Try to capture these valuable inputs in a central location such as your intranet or Slack or Microsoft Teams channels.

L&D has to move away from the traditional course mindset toward experiences. Before starting a new project, take the time to think through the touchpoints the learner has with a particular topic and tie it into the workflow instead of taking them away from work and the task at hand.

About the Authors

Bianca Baumann

“Content is king.” We have heard this phrase many times before. With the advent of new content curation technologies in L&D, lots of organizations want to jump on the bandwagon and offer their learners the best possible experience through the newest gadgets. But before starting any curation efforts, we have to remember that good content is the foundation of all effective learning.

The Basics of a Content Strategy

Think of a content strategy as an inventory at a grocery store. Stores keep track of what is on their shelves and in the warehouse so they know exactly how many products they can sell. If they come close to products selling out, they order more. If a store doesn’t have inventory in place, how do they know when to order new products?

According to Kristina Halvorson, CEO and founder of Brain Traffic, content strategy is the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” It lets you manage your content as a business asset. “Content” includes the content you write as well as images and multimedia. Ultimately, having an established content curation strategy helps create meaningful, engaging, and sustainable content and enables you to identify the right content at the right time for the right audience. You can easily recognize what content already exists, what should be created, and, more importantly, why it should be created. Leveraging data here is key to pinpointing what content is accessed the most and what content has hardly been touched.

Create a Content Strategy That Sticks

The best place to start is with what you already have in place. Most organizations have an abundance of content with no central repository or one person responsible for maintaining it. Get all stakeholders together, including instructional designers, facilitators, copywriters, and someone from marketing, and simply summarize what content already exists. Then, create a content strategy plan, which can be a simple Google or Excel sheet outlining, for example, content titles; descriptions; delivery channel; access data (how often, devices, time of day); responsibilities; tags; and maintenance cycle. This will help identify current gaps and show the additional content that is needed. When thinking about content creation, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. As a rule of thumb, create about 65% of content, curate 25%, and collaborate on 10%.

Next Step – Curate Content

First off, content curation in the traditional marketing sense is the process of sorting through large amounts of content on the web and presenting the best posts in a meaningful way. Curation is not creating new content but rather discovering, compiling, and sharing existing content. L&D departments don’t necessarily go out and use the entire web for their content curation purposes (although they might use tools such as Degreed); they often focus on in-house content.

The key to successful content curation lies in the learner’s ability to find appropriate content, which means that content needs to be properly tagged and organized in the first place. It’s our responsibility to sift through content, and group and categorize it. Categories could include onboarding, product training, etc. Then, the content is shared through online portals and platforms that can be accessed by the learner as needed.

The advantage of curation tools is the just-in-time delivery of content and the relevance it has to the learner. More and more, we see a need to move away from the traditional LMS toward a more robust platform that aligns with modern learners and their needs to access relevant content when and how they need it. However, before moving into that direction, ensure you have the basics in place, which will help to create a successful content curation strategy that makes a difference to your learners.

About the Authors

Bianca Baumann