10 Tips For A Winning Learning Strategy For Your Organization

1. Provide just in time learning

• ​Adopting a new tool or process in a few months?  Now is the time to start planning - but not yet time to start training end users.  Timing can be tricky, but ideally, it’s early enough to prevent user errors and late enough that employees can go back to their desks and try it out for themselves.

2. Training should relate to real use cases for your employees

• Most of us don’t have time to learn something new just for the sake of learning it.  We don’t want to know every feature, configuration and possibility – start by showing what’s needed for the immediate tasks at hand.  Make more information available later via on-demand training or lunch and learns.

3. Keep it in small consumable chunks

• All day training sessions are the worst.  Besides the cost of lost productivity, it’s challenging to pay attention for that long.  Even if we do manage to stay focused, we don’t retain much (the “forgetting curve” proposed by psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus shows that we can lose 70% within 24 hours).  Keep end user training to 90 minutes or less.  30-minute training sessions are easy to lead and to fit on the calendar.  Keep short sessions simple, 2-3 topics max.

4. Technology is not the (whole) answer

• Investing in new technology and providing training is not enough.  If the processes that these tools are intended to support are broken, no amount of technology or technical training will win.  Get your processes in order and documented to make the most of your investments.

​5. Tap into people’s competitive nature

• Gamify learning.  Create a contest where every week users need to report, or better yet show (take advantage of the “protégé effect” that shows we learn best by teaching) that they’ve tackled another new task with the new tool or process.  Make the reward fun and visible.

6. Don’t lose tribal knowledge

• Yammer gets a bad rap as simply being ‘social for enterprise’ but it can be so much more.  Replace email distribution groups where questions and answers go to die in the dark; create Yammer groups for your subject matter experts and let the Q&A be visible to all that need the information.

7. Find your champions

• You know them - they’re the ones always asking when the new tools will be deployed and when training will be provided.  Don’t miss this opportunity to delegate adoption tasks to the early adopters.  They’re invaluable when they provide peer pressure to get colleagues onboard.

8. Ask new employees for honest feedback

• Before new hires have a chance to devise their workarounds, be sure to ask how their onboarding is going.  Can they find what they need?  Do they know how to use the tools?  Do they understand the processes?  Encourage them to be brutally honest.

9. Provide training in varied formats:

• Exploratory versus Click-Path
  • Some end users learn best with exact instructions and others with high-level tasks that encourage them to discover the answer.  Try to provide for both learning styles.
• In-person versus Online
  • In-person training is fantastic for encouraging collaboration and Q&A sessions, but for those who are shy, busy and/or remote, providing live, online sessions can be very effective.  If possible, resist the urge to combine the two – online attendees tend to stay quiet rather than interrupt a room full of attendees.
• Real-time vs On-Demand
  • Real-time, online training allows users to ask questions and get their answers right away but consider recording these sessions and making them available on-demand.  Place in an area that allows for an online Q&A.  SharePoint pages with Comments on, Yammer and Teams will all work.

10. Take advantage of your Office 365 tools

• PowerPoint
  • Have you tested the ‘Record desktop’ feature in PowerPoint yet?  It will record your voice and your desktop, regardless of what tools and/or processes you’d like to teach.  Videos can stay in PowerPoint or can be uploaded as stand-alone .mp4 files.
• Stream
  • Your enterprise YouTube.  Create Groups and Channels, promote important videos and have employees download the app for offline viewing.
• Office 365 Forms
  • This tool allows you to create quizzes.  Mark the correct answers as you’re creating the quiz and let end users get their scores right away.  These can even be embedded in Stream videos to provide knowledge checks throughout videos.
• Teams Live Events
  • Our go-to tool here at Pivotal for webinars, Teams Live Events allow you to broadcast to thousands of users, make recordings available to attendees, provide closed-captioning, and has a built-in Q&A feature.
• Yammer
  • As mentioned in idea #6, consider Yammer to create groups for your subject matter experts.  Employees will be able to quickly search existing questions and answers before asking theirs.  Don’t let your company’s tribal knowledge leave with your employees.