Our friends at a well-known company in Redmond, Washington have arguably created some of the most ubiquitous software tools in history, including the word processor that I’m using to craft this article. They have created the operating systems used to power phones, laptops, desktops, and servers. They have built one of the leading cloud hosting platforms that hosts thousands of applications and secure data and content that you and I create every day.
In November 1996, they also created one of the world’s first digital coaches. The coach’s name was Clippy, reportedly the brainchild of Melinda Gates, and was bundled as a free feature for Office 97. It is among the most universally hated software applications in history.
Fast forward 27 years. Many organizations are now revisiting the concept of digital coaching to deliver personalized, highly scalable coaching, support, and learning to employees directly in the flow of work. With other more traditional methods to enable workflow learning, let’s dive deep into what digital coaching is as well as when and where it might be useful.
Digital coaching can be categorized into at least three variants. A common interpretation involves a human coach, available virtually and on-demand, who provides personalized 1:1 coaching to an employee. Another variant is a software-driven coach that guides an employee through a known task, providing relevant information or support as they flow through the work.
A third emerging approach relies heavily on the adjacent field of behavioral economics: digital coaches can be trained to monitor known data sets and look for signals to identify when and where an employee may need support. The digital coach then delivers a behavioral nudge that prompts the employee towards a specific action.
The use of behavioral nudging as a form of digital coaching enables workflow learning practitioners to support employees in ways that have typically been more elusive. For example, an organization may be concerned about rising attrition within its frontline employee ranks. A digital coach could monitor signals in production data in a factory or warehouse. If productivity or quality decreases below historical norm, the employee could receive a behavioral nudge prompting them with additional guidance on how to increase speed or reduce errors. If problems continue to persist, a human coach could be prompted to intervene.
Another digital coach could monitor signals in data that may precede or elevate the risk of resignations. For example, the data may examine recent attendance data to look for patterns, high-performing employees who haven’t been promoted for an extended period of time, or employees who may have moved through multiple managers due to reorganization.
In short, traditional workflow learning has proven effective for processes and procedures, particularly those embedded in software. Digital coaching can be an effective method to provide support for principle-based tasks where there is no one right or wrong answer, as often is the case in areas like people management, problem solving, and sales.