On March 5, 2020, I was standing in the lobby of my office anxiously awaiting our CEO to exit a black Suburban. Twenty minutes had passed, and I was questioning if he was expecting me to open the door. Knowing Chris Swift, I thought that was highly unlikely. When the door opened and Chris emerged, he had a very somber look on his face. He said that Covid was starting to shut down the east coast and he feared that he was making his last visit for a while. The next week, everything would change.
You all know the story of the world beginning to shut down and shelter in place. Our insurance industry was part of the front line as disability claims started pummeling businesses due to Covid infections and isolation orders. In the past, leveraging supplemental resource groups was a common practice for insurers to manage crises like property catastrophes, but they were never really used for disability management—and certainly not at the scale we were facing. When our learning team and performance support were called upon to increase the ranks of our disability analysts from other departments in the company, hundreds of volunteers were put into virtual (online) learning experiences to help with the workflow. In any organizational experience, our learning strategy leans heavily on performance support. This time, we would take chunks of workflows and allow teams to perform specific steps. Our Knowledge Management Tool (KMT) provides performance support in this format. Our designers added a Covid “learn more” area to beef up what was known about this novel virus. Within a week of navigating the performance support and practicing in the claim platform, our groups were able to move into production and increase capacity for the spike. That allowed us time to create automation around some of the decisions to approve absences and lessen the strain on our organization.
Because our entire learning strategy utilizes a performance-based approach, the learners were familiar with training being embedded in the work. After about six months, the supplemental workers returned to their normal roles. Unfortunately, the cycle repeated in January 2021. This time, we knew what we were up against, and the strategy was already in place. The KMT was updated, and the resources were ready to help those battling the virus.
Throughout this crisis, we weren’t panicked. Why? Because we knew we had a sound performance support system. We pitched in by offering up content design, training, leadership, and evaluation/measurement resources. We relied on subject matter experts to fuel the content for Covid information, though it was sometimes scarce or evolving daily. So, what did we learn about ourselves as an organization through this work? 1) Learning in the moment is a necessity when catastrophic events occur. 2) It’s really about the customer and meeting their moment of need. 3) Expertise, empathy, and ease need to prevail in the organization. 4) Well architected content can make all the difference.