For any small, ambitious business, rapid growth means quickly scaling up employee numbers. Continued success requires these individuals to get up to speed fast and for all employees to work together effectively, building and sharing knowledge. But how can a business achieve consistent onboarding and training when essential knowledge and intelligence is in the heads of a handful of senior individuals? How can it reinforce the company culture and ethos that is key to ongoing success?
Empirical knowledge and experience sharing works well for a handful of employees, but as numbers grow the business needs to achieve a more robust and consistent approach not only to onboarding and knowledge sharing but also the continuing development of skills and shared experience. This does not, however, demand the creation of multiple formalised training courses but embracing a model that allows individuals to absorb information and skills from trusted colleagues through a more social, applied approach.
As Fred Thompson, CEO at Thirst explains, when learning is embedded, collaborative and applied, it becomes easier to demonstrate tangible value, not through training volumes, but by enabling better performance, faster onboarding and a workforce that continuously learns from itself…
Knowledge Capture
Business success can raise unexpected operational challenges yet for many innovative and driven business leaders the most significant is the tipping point when the relaxed, informal and personal knowledge sharing that occurs when numbers are small suddenly no longer works. In many ways, that point is great news: it denotes a company growing fast enough to need significant numbers of new employees. But it also raises serious questions. When there are too many people for one-to-one, on the job education, how can employees be onboarded quickly and consistently? How can the company ensure ongoing training and knowledge sharing? Or enforce compliance to regulatory training demands?
Vital information relating to the company history, culture, competition and customers is often in business leaders’ heads, or, at best available in a PowerPoint, blog post or online tutorial. These information resources, where they exist, are not consistent, up to date or easily shared. Without documented, enforced onboarding processes, new starters are not automatically signposted to structured, relevant information. Such haphazard onboarding processes can be a serious detriment to future success. At best, individuals take longer to become productive; at worst there is a disconnect between employee understanding that could undermine the company culture.
For smaller organisations without a dedicated learning and development (L&D) function, on boarding responsibility can be spread between teams and departments. As the business grows it is vital to avoid overwhelming these individuals with demands that are outside their remit. It is therefore essential to find a way to capture and share not only the knowledge of the business founders but also the evolving knowledge base of the entire organisation.
Improving Engagement
Businesses also need a way to empower social learning. Learning methodology has evolved away from the structured delivery of classroom style training courses: the goal today is to make it easy for people to engage with new information and for existing staff to share their knowledge and experience. With a learning platform that empowers employees to share information in different formats, companies can quickly build a diverse knowledge base across content styles that allow individuals to engage with information as they prefer. As well as meetings, webinars and events, content can include YouTube videos, blogs, quizzes and links to media articles, allowing individuals to learn on the go, in bite-sized chunks.
This approach also provides a central repository for organic information sharing between employees, ensuring the links typically shared via email or Slack are retained for future use rather than lost. It allows individuals to comment on content, again building on the social learning approach to both achieve new levels of engagement and reinforce bonds between employees.
New Thinking
The combination of AI with structured social learning is also transforming the ease with which organisations can connect information across disparate systems and documents, turning scattered knowledge into relevant, accessible learning experiences. Learning from employees’ content engagement reinforces the use of preferred communication channels and content types, creating a learning experience that becomes part of the flow of work rather than a separate activity.
Furthermore, AI is helping to develop training and learning content, using its knowledge and understanding of the company – its size, history, market and competition – as well as the requirements of different job roles. Individual users can guide AI to provide additional assistance – such as asking for an example of how the information works for a specific activity day to day or looking for specific external content to gain additional insight. Again, any relevant external content can be stored within the learning platform and made available to the wider employee base.
At every stage of the process, the way individuals are engaging with the content can be assessed and reviewed. Businesses can understand what forms of content best resonate with different audiences; ensure employees are undertaking required training and continually evolve processes – most notably onboarding – in response to employee engagement. As companies grow, measures of productivity, even retention, can be mapped to process and content engagement both to support further improvements and quantify the value of the learning and development activity to the business.
Conclusion
As companies grow, the quality of L&D will have a significant impact on continued success. And while budgets are tight, there is now a compelling opportunity to embrace not only technology innovation but also a shift in learning mindset that will deliver immediate and longer-term benefits.
In addition to capturing the vital knowledge of business founders and the wider management team, a learning platform builds collaboration throughout the employee base. It encourages individuals to share their own experiences – from a quick video to a blog post or article link. And provides a platform for engaging with the wider community.
Critically, a single consolidated source of information supports the creation of robust, consistent and up to date L&D processes – from onboarding to routine review and training compliance. And, with full visibility of how and when employees are engaging with the resource, business leaders can begin to understand the influence of different processes and learning on measures of performance, productivity and retention that are vital indicators of future business growth.
