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.