It’s a success! Your initial workflow learning pilot/project has begun to deliver results. Stakeholders are happy and employees are giving you their thumbs up. You bask in the success of this new initiative only to find that, months later, usage of the expensive new workflow learning technology is down and classroom training requests are up. Employees aren’t even bothering to give you their thumbs down. They just totally ignore the tools that you and your team spent so much time and energy to develop.
What went wrong?
Sometimes, we are so excited by the idea of the transition to our new workflow learning program or the fancy new technology we will be using, we forget about planning how to sustain that initiative long term. The IT industry is littered with failed technology projects that didn’t deliver the intended value to the organization. How do we prevent workflow learning from suffering the same fate? We’ve found 5 key steps you can take to increase the likelihood that your workflow learning initiative will be a long-term success.
1) ENGAGE: “Organizational inertia” is extremely powerful, especially since temporary changes in habits can create a fleeting sense of success. Too often, the implementation of a workflow learning strategy is the end-goal, but that is really just the beginning. In fact, you are never “finished” with a workflow learning initiative. Content in your organization should become a living reaction to the external and internal changes in your business. Every day, we are presented with a new process, policy, procedure, task, variation, exception, tool, or technology that should be reflected in our workflow learning efforts. We must engage across the organization and drive the fundamental shift in how learning and employee performance happens.
2) ENABLE: Workflow learning initiatives are often treated as “projects”. A cross-functional team is brought together to launch the project and then disbanded as team members resume their “day jobs”. While this may have been critical to the launch, long-term success depends on a wider group of content authors, reviewers, and curators. We find that a well-designed workflow learning program gives organizations the ability to rethink the content lifecycle. Enable your SME’s and others who are close to the work (and expertise) to become content CREATORS. Enable L&D to become content CURATORS. This requires investment in both groups, but the impact is incredible as front-line workers claim ownership for content and L&D provides structure, guidance, and direction instead of delivering more unwanted courses.
3) EMPOWER: Move decision making closer to where the work is being done by the real experts. This drives pride of content authorship and ownership and ensures that knowledge is valued. Allow experimentation and assume that the grand vision you and your team spent months designing might (should) require tweaks as it meets real-world needs and feedback.
4) EVALUATE: Measure what the business measures (e.g., process/transaction time, accuracy, quality, time to competence, etc.). Speak the language of the business and embrace the resulting ownership of your role in impacting these measures. Remember, it’s no longer about retention and assessment: it’s about performance and outcomes. New hires, new systems, and/or processes are a great place to A/B test or measure performance against previous approaches. The single most overlooked metric that we see is the amount of time that employees spend looking for information (an average of 2.5 hours a day). We believe this is one of the largest causes of lost productivity as employees are overloaded with increasingly irrelevant information and content.
5) EVANGELIZE: Nothing incentivizes your newly enabled and empowered content creation team like recognition. This is a critical part of the sustainment strategy and a mechanism to prevent organizational inertia back to the “old ways”. Use every opportunity to highlight positive performance outcomes, reduced costs, and higher employee engagement and satisfaction that comes with a successful workflow learning initiative. Speak at conferences, write papers, and participate in organizations like the WLPA. It only takes a few well publicized successes to create the interest needed to make workflow learning a ubiquitous and welcome strategy.
Walking 10,000 steps a day might seem like your health goal, but your doctor will tell you that the real goal is an overall change in habits and lifestyle that leads to a longer and healthier life. Likewise, workflow learning’s real goal is a permanent and sustainable shift in how learning happens in the workplace.