6.Allocate time for staff to learn. Make them feel it’s normal, expected and not an indulgence. The modern learner spends just 5 minutes1 learning each day so it shouldn’t be prohibitive to improve on that. An hour a week is a comfortable level for many of our clients and is what we encourage at Filtered.

Bridge the gap between work and learning through your own stories of usefully applying, case studies, highly practical learning materials and 70-20-10 learning theory.8

Persuade senior management to participate, and participate publicly. A 2 minute video from the CEO in which she describes what she’s learning was effective at a global investment bank. An in-person kick-off session delivered by the CEO worked at Asthma UK. If they can do this regularly, even better. This HBR podcast might help to persuade the powers that be.7

Buy staff a book each. It’s useful, tangible, public and sends a great signal. We did that earlier this year at Filtered. Encourage note-making and book-sharing. Start a library.

Learners will be more motivated to learn if what they’re doing will benefit them in future positions inside or outside your company. Enable them to report their learning progress independently of the who they work for.

7.8.9.

10.

Buy A Book

70-20-10

Learners Own Data£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

Culture

chiefs

Allocate Time£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

Filling out forms with information you know your company already has on you is demoralising and understandably leads to drop off. Any data you can easily grab (even just first name helps with UX and user goodwill) – talk to IT about what’s possible. And even if you can’t get a thing, there’s plenty of form-filling UX best practices6 now which make the process a lot less painful for colleagues.

Minimise clicks. We’ve seen as many as 15 between the learner and the learning (hidden away inside an LMS). Think of 5 as an absolute maximum. Many firms have achieved this. Demand that technology integration be truly integrated so that your workforce trusts it. If it’s not, then think about a separate cloud solution which isn’t integrated with every legacy technology system your company has ever bought. At a departmental level we see more and more of this.

Publicise with live kick-off webinars, recorded how-to webinars, drop-in sessions, lunch & learns, and monthly spotlight (e.g. Excel August). This goes hand in hand with Senior Management commitment.

Benefits

2. Badges

1. Appraisals£ £ £ £ £

Make it easy

5. Shout!£ £ £ £ £

3.4.

Quick Access

Sign Up Forms£ £ £ £ £

Much easier to set up for employers these days. Also easier for staff to gain from e.g. by listing on LinkedIn. See DigitalMe, Credly, Mozilla Badges and the Learning and Performance Institute.5

Establish and communicate the link between appraisals (identifying skills gaps and career paths) and the learning which fills those gaps and builds those paths. Consider linking this at least loosely to remuneration.

16.Make sure each email you send is succinct, purposeful, occasional, friendly and personalized. Animated GIFs are a good way of grabbing the user’s precious attention without them necessarily even opening the email. Grammarly do a great job of this too (scroll down a little) as have Asana.10

Sheep-dip, mandatory, click-next, dull content, many hours compliance has earned itself a bad reputation. Don’t let that tarnish the perception of the elective learning experiences you offer your staff. If everything has to sit on a single LMS, find a way of separating compliance from elective learning.

Notifications are obviously efficient. But they can quickly become annoying. So use them but use them sparingly and make sure what you send is relevant and interesting. A summary of what that user’s done and how that compares to other users is relevant and useful. Grammarly do a great job of this.9

Just in time learning seeded in the workflow is the holy grail of learning interventions. We experience it as consumers when TripAdvisor suggests a nearby restaurant close to lunchtime when we’re in a new place. It’s much harder in corporate learning but not impossible e.g. recommendations for learning appearing in Slack, triggered by certain key words or phrases.

The learning must affect the audience. Emotion, context, authenticity and storytelling are all part of it. Note that libraries almost always lack this. You need to help bring the emotion to the table, creatively, proactively. There’s a great short video by Nick Shackleton-Jones on this.3

17.18.

19.20.

workflow

not compliance

emotion£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

make learners feel

automation

email£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

The modern worker has very little time.1 Shorter, more accessible chunks tend to suit that kind of schedule better, which includes mobile learning, and increased take-up. But be aware that long form is important too: for building expertise in intellectually difficult subject matter. Dipping in for 5 minutes won’t ensure that a body of staff will build a comprehensive understanding in a short period of time e.g. in a transfer of departmental knowledge.

Different/fresh/innovative is almost certainly better than same-old. So be bold. For example, a conversational interface is uniquely engaging and familiar,2 and focuses user attention brilliantly. Your fresh thinking need only be a superficial layer to have the intended effect. A beautiful webform (try Typeform) or impactful landing page can go a long way.

Content

11.12.

quality

relevance£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

user experience

15. think different£ £ £ £ £

13.14.

mix it up

micro£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

Note that there are degrees of relevance / personalization and the further you can go the better: industry, company, department, and individual. Learners expect consumer grade and consumer grade means tailored to the person. Apple, Amazon, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Spotify are successful because their services are relentlessly personalized and relevant.

Content was king once. Now it’s quality. There are millions of free and paid-for assets (see our panorama infographic15) and now quantity has become undesirable and quality essential. Choose providers carefully and knowledgeably. Most aren’t great, some are excellent e.g. Pluralsight, SkillPill, GetAbstract, HBR, Filtered courses and many free materials.

Know how you’re going to judge the learning activities and experiences that you’re providing.4 These won’t necessarily be the obvious ones. It might be that learning stirs up discussion between sales and product or sales and strategy and this might be captured on Slack, Yammer etc. Equally, don’t rule out the obvious; time spent for example is much maligned but for elective learning it may be the best practical measures.

Test-Learn-Test is a simple method of measuring and reporting progress.

1. Test proficiency at the outset2. Provide learnin (tailored to

test results if possible)3. Test proficiency at the end

Far from perfect but relatively easy to administer and gives some data to fuel a discussion about the impact of the learning.

incentivise

21.22.

rewards

test-learn-TEST£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

23.

24.

Gamify

kpiS£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

Points, leaderboards, simulations, beat- the-clock, and very friendly interfaces. These are some brilliant examples of gamification.12 But again proceed with caution. Adult learners are adults and tend to feel patronised more readily than children.

A large professional services firm we work with offered cash incentives for new staff to study for a qualification outside of normal working billable hours. Massive uptake and almost 100% success rate. In an adjacent field, Vitality have used rewards to encourage healthy behaviour.11 Cash could be vouchers, perks, or other rewards. But proceed with caution! Pitched wrong this can come across negatively and demoti-vate. Caution means (amongst other things) consultation.

report Progress

In 2017 real-time reporting should be demanded. But scheduled review and discussion milestones are actually more useful. People are so busy, so it’s only power users that will be making much use of live statistics. Agree upfront the stakeholders, frequency, KPIs and purpose of these meetings. At the very least you’ll need to cover usage, impact and adjustments to the plan. Quarterly tends to be the optimal frequency for our clients.

Appraisals identify skills gaps. Learning closes them over the next performance period (6/12 months). The following appraisal must assess to what extent these gaps have been closed. Better still, discuss this between appraisals. We have check points one-third and two-thirds of the way between reviews at Filtered. Some companies are able to explicitly link skills gaps, learning and remuneration so that progress is fully monitored and rewarded.

25.26.

live & check points

appraisals£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

Get the biggest bang for your buck. What skills are needed and used a lot in your business? Maybe they are boring answers like: Excel, meetings or email.14 That might be your bargain. Connect this to the ROI calculation mentioned above. Your CEO will thank you for this.

prove impact

27.28.

user feedback

calculate roi£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

29. 80:20£ £ £ £ £

Try to quantify numerically the uplift in productivity of the learning that you’ve instigated. Even a rough calculation gives scale and fuels healthy business debate. We wrote a whitepaper about a new, simple methodology.13

Consider all the possibilities here: usage (hours), explicitly ask about usefulness (opinion), test proficiency (assessment), measure changes in performance (apprais-als), business impact (department/company performance).

A rich, varied learning experience is more enjoyable and effective for an individual and essential for a workforce. Short-form, long-form, mixed media, multiple providers, free and paid. TED talks are often used to attract learners and there’s often a halo effect as they then go on to try other learning material too. You needn’t spend much or any money. There are thousands of brilliant assets in the public domain e.g. LinkedIn articles, Medium, and School of Life. Curate with an open mind.

£ £ £ £ £

£ £ £ £ £

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/heytodd/the-modern-learner-infographic-final-v4120414[2] https://www.typeform.com/blog/human-experience/cui/

& https://uxplanet.org/designing-and-validating-a-conversational-ui-70294766ba9c [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fixing-learning-education-5-mins-well-actually-more-8-nick [4] http://www.aect.org/pdf/proceedings13/2013i/13_38.pdf[5] https://www.thelpi.org/digital-badges/[6] http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-new-rules-of-form-design/[7] https://hbr.org/2008/02/harvard-business-ideacast-83-l[8] http://deakinprime.com/media/47821/002978_dpw_70-20-10wp_v01_fa.pdf

[9] https://blog.iterable.com/user-engagement-done-right-grammarly-9c727a5e4dcb[10] http://connect.asana.com/1L9Q-4GWLD-7ABKN6HZB3/cr.aspx?v=0

& https://reallygoodemails.com/tag/grammarly/ [11] http://uk.businessinsider.com/vitality-apple-watch-promote-exercise-2016-9[12] https://elearningindustry.com/5-killer-examples-gamified-elearning[13] http://learn.filtered.com/whats-the-value-of-training-an-roi-methodology[14] http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/the-social-economy[15] http://learn.filtered.com/learning-panorama-2017-infographic

- Cost. Combination of direct and indirect costs. As a very rough rule of thumb, each £ is ~£10-20k.- Benefit. Also varied and includes improved skills, productivity, reduced churn, etc. Rule of thumb: each is ~£20-30k.- Offered by Filtered.

adoption

engagement

impact

Everyone’s frantic. No-one has any time. The modern worker finds just 1% for learning. We’re interrupted hundreds of times a day by a device in our pockets. Many learning experiences have been off-putting (poor content, compliance) for years.

So it’s hard for us learning professionals to make learning happen. This can be frustrating. In servicing hundreds of clients and almost a million consumers, we’ve discovered and created many solutions (some of which are a bit hacky). We hope some of these will be useful to you and your company.