Swapping Programs For The New Company Mind
Make it easy for your learners to learn
Progressive companies are turning learning design upside down to improve KPI results around company performance, and the move helps build and maintain expertise, even in a world where new knowledge has to be consumed every day to keep up with the To survive competition.
If you’re ready to take it, here’s a challenge for you: take 80% of the knowledge out of your courses and get it where people need it and where they actually access it. Design it for informal learning in the workflow and make it available in small sessions of a few minutes on a mobile device.
While you’re at it, design your learning so that you can easily turn slides into FAQs, turn process flows into infographics, or break videos into small pieces so that they’re easy to reuse, for example.
What I’m saying is that you are entrusting your team to make it easier for your learners to access the knowledge they need in the moment.
You can leave the other 20% as formal learning experiences if you wish, but when you bring that 80% into in-flow learning and start transferring understanding of skills through practice, you will begin to build that, what we like to call “the brain of the company” at Fuse.
This “corporate brain” has been helping Fuse achieve impressive results for clients such as Vodafone, Avon, Hilti and more for many years.
In addition, it just got better. Our new Knowledge Engine is like three icing on the cake for the company’s brain and will deliver measurable performance benefits. If you want to transform learning and turn it upside down in order to develop your own corporate brain with the help of our knowledge engine, read on.
First things first, what on earth is a corporate brain?
The fact is, most L&D managers are all too aware of the ineffectiveness of courses, and forward-thinking companies started moving away from courses some time ago. They know that course-based learning performance declines rapidly over time, with course knowledge retention dropping from 30% to 8% over the course of a year.
For example, in a 2018 study by MIT and Deloitte on digital transformation (more than 4,300 executives participated), the most successful, fastest growing digital companies had one thing in common: They had changed the way individuals and organizations learn .
The study found that employees at these companies study all the time, not just once a year. Of these top performing companies, MIT and Deloitte found that 44% of those companies workforce continuously update their skills.
Continuous learning is great, but we also like to emphasize “knowledge in the workflow” because it focuses on getting bite-sized knowledge when and where you need it. It is this last detail that really makes the difference between learning and a business brain. Think of a company’s brain as an extension of all of the tacit knowledge that can be shared and consumed among colleagues.
We cannot claim that it is our own concept; “the corporate brain” is actually a term coined by our customer Hilti. The multinational developer and manufacturer of construction and building maintenance products felt hindered by its course-based approach to learning. For example, the engineering modules lasted more than ten hours per course, and employee onboarding was a four-week personal commitment. In 2017, Hilti tried to revolutionize its learning experiences for all employees and brought the corporate brain to life with Fuse.
So what distinguishes Hilti’s corporate brain, developed for optimized L&D? Here it is in brief:
- It’s no longer classroom based
With Fuse, Hilti has updated its content strategy to move away from a classroom-based approach. - It’s mobile
Outside of the classroom and on mobile devices, Hilti engineers wanted to learn on the go. - It is implicit knowledge that is relevant to the needs they have
Hilti didn’t want to hear from people outside of her team; They wanted to learn from Hilti experts. - It is easy for Hilti experts to create the content
Content creation doesn’t take weeks or months – it takes less than a few hours. - It democratizes learning
Fuse gives Hiltis employees a voice and gives everyone the opportunity to share their findings. It’s a one-way street. - It’s a lot more video based now
They are real people “in the moment” demonstrating relevant things in bite-sized videos. - It is little and often
Personal onboarding programs, which lasted anywhere from one to four weeks, were switched to a model where people got on board by learning small pieces of information on a daily basis. - It uses data analysis
This helps Hilti to understand and present its business results. The company doesn’t have to guess what its users want or what they will be doing. - Content is relevant to certain users
A company’s brain doesn’t just rely on a content aggregator to deliver the same content to everyone. It encourages content curation across communities to make learning relevant.
From course-based learning to corporate brains, Hilti’s achievements are impressive (and if you’d like to find out more, click here). But today’s corporate brain gets even better when customers use the Fuse Knowledge Engine.
The corporate brain has gotten better now
It is fair to say that Google has changed the way we learn and has become something of an extension of our brains by making everything accessible and discoverable. We no longer have to think about the answers to the most important questions in our heads that were asked most frequently to Google in 2019, what are the NBA playoffs, what is my IP address, what is love, when are they? early signs of pregnancy and if you can believe it where am i? Let’s not dwell on the questions Google asked in 2020 and 2021 – too depressing.
The point is, we trust Google with some pretty personal queries and expect it to deliver at the right time, as in the Where Am I? Section. Query. A person whose immediate location is unclear does not want to be directed to a course for compass or GPS use. You just need to know how to download Google Maps on your phone.
So it comes as no surprise that people in the corporate setting expect learning to be just as accessible and want a knowledge machine that is an extension of their brains. They also want to be able to trust the knowledge that is recommended to them and the answers that come back.
We do that today at Fuse with our new knowledge engine. Make no mistake, we have always understood the importance of search in order to have knowledge in the workflow. But now we’re reducing the search time to just 30 seconds.
The new Knowledge Intelligence Engine crawls and analyzes internal knowledge (both implicit and explicit) in the same way that Google crawls, indexes and categorizes external content. It’s about as far as you can get from traditional courses, and it overwhelms the already formidable corporate brain that our clients have built with Fuse.
Fuse
Used by over 150 progressive organizations worldwide – including Hilti, Vodafone, Panasonic, Scandic, and Avon – Fuse encourages active engagement in deeper learning experiences that drive employee performance.
Originally published at blog.fuseuniversal.com.
