D Foster Associates

I was just at a seminar where one of the examples they gave about the power of e-Learning and online support tools was the ability to help employees be more productive during a natural disaster.

The seminar was about Enhancing the Customer Experience, and focused heavily on call-center issues.  The speaker posed the question, “What would happen to your call center during a Bird-flu pandemic?”  As you would all guess, if there were to be a Bird-flu breakout, you would not want (or be able to have) all of your employees coming together in one large call-center to spread the disease.  In a recent Will Thalheimer post on this topic, Will suggests:

Training-Learning-and-Development could be vital in at least two ways: First, it could help mobilize and educate workers. Second, it could ramp up to provide extra learning services during the crisis. If workers can’t work, they can learn. Certainly, businesses will want the workers to work, but if they can’t, perhaps this is an opportunity for strategic, revolutionary organizational change. A time for reflection, learning, bonding, and helping others.

At the seminar, we focused on a different goal.  If you design your call-center (or any mission critical part of your business) so that each worker has access to web based training and tools to make them productive, the sudden switch to a work-at-home solution is very feasible.  When you think about it, this is a huge potential selling point for e-learning and online performance support tools.  The workers could be anywhere at anytime, and still perform on the job.  Even in the face of a disaster that would limit their ability to get to work.  In the post 9/11 world, this could help you move your e-learning initiative from a “nice to have” to a “mission critical” implementation.

I just finished a great online seminar hosted by CLO Media called the The Future of Corporate Education: Embedding Learning into Business Processes.  It really rang true with many of the projects and ideas that I am working on right now.

Claire from Forrester referred to it as “Contextual Learning” which she said is learning integrated into the work environment, is more informal, puts the learner in charge, targets a real-time need, and is very collaborative.

I have been referring to this as a collaborative learning environment.  The key is that you don’t want a worker to have to leave their work to learn what they need to do.  Also, the learning needs to be much shorter and focused on their current issue, with the learning modules being between 4 and 10 minutes in length.  The emphasis is much less on retention and more on immediate performance.

Ole Lunddahl went a step further and talked about using current portal and search technology to automatically embed links to learning options and performance tools within a portal that automatically change based on the information on the screen that the worker is interacting with, including the actual data that is pulled up.  Think of it as AdWords for learning.  I had been thinking it was possible, but it’s always nice to see an example of it.

I think the key in all of this is to look at what can help drive performance on the job, and to stop thinking of learning as an “event” that pulls you out of your work, and just design the learning into the process.

I just wanted to let everybody know about a great opportunity to speak at a New England Learning Association event.  You can get all the details on the NELA Blog, but basically they are looking for people to provide a 5 minute presentation that showcases their best e-Learning case study, best practice or technique.  I’ll be giving a presentation on “Moving from Training to Collaborative Learning.”  If you have ever wanted to speak, but didn’t want to give a one hour presentation, this is it!

If you are more interested in learning about growing your business, then you could also join me at the Beechwood Forum.

Or just come join me for a night of Art, Wine & Networking

I look forward to seeing you at one of these events!