The Best Performance Support System is the One You Already Have
You may already have this performance support portal in place — and not even know it.
How much do employees learn from one-time training? Whatever they learn, they likely forget not long after the training ends. Formal training can do a great job of imparting company values and culture, not so much supporting knowledge and skills in the long term.
Performance support can be an inexpensive alternative to or supplement for formal one-time learning. Performance support systems can reinforce the application of new work skills.
Performance support is the key to workplace training that lasts.
Platforms for Productivity
In recent years, many companies have adopted Slack as a platform for work communication. With the rise of Slack in the modern office environment, Microsoft released Teams as a Slack competitor that is included in Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions.
This means many companies may already have access to a great performance support platform and not even know it.
These work chat solutions are also micro portals and can be designed to deliver formal training, as well as become starting points for many work procedures. The key is that Slack and Teams can support work procedures while also bringing workers closer together as a foundation for social learning.
From the employees’ point of view, Slack and Teams function as a command central where many of their workflows take place, and where they can chat with coworkers, search for needed information, and get new notifications on the go from their mobile devices.
Chat
Though both Slack and Teams began as glorified instant messaging apps, they’ve since become much more capable content management platforms for social learning. In fact, Teams for Education is already being used as a virtual classroom.
With a dedicated content management system, workers are more confident that the information they need is available. When it’s part of a communication platform, they’re also empowered to ask questions and confirm their hunches. New employees are not the only ones to benefit. Compared to walking to the other side of the office, it’s effortless to reach out multiple colleagues in one chat and collaborate or share new information.
Even if an employee’s very specific question or case is not addressed in the searchable materials, they have a starting point to ask better questions. They know more about what they don’t know.
Search
Performance support can ameliorate the weaknesses of human memory. Learners can access performance support resources multiple times and follow guidelines until a task becomes automatic. Most people are familiar with this kind of learning because they had to follow instructions in school and still do when reading a product manual, or accessing how-to guides online.
The Wiki tab is one of the simplest tabs in Teams, and it comes preinstalled. Between Wikis, Word documents, OneNote files, and PDF’s, a company using Teams can harness multiple ways to provide information, and all of it is searchable.
A company may choose to invest in more interactive content such as interactive scenarios for decision-making. These, too, are well-supported in Teams through PowerPoint, Pear Deck, and other tools.
Mobile
The best thing about both Slack and Teams? Slick mobile apps are already available, so there is no need for a custom mobile training solution. Chat is already better on mobile than email. Now, employees traveling for work or outside of the office can create a boundary between their work and personal lives by using chat function in Teams instead of texting back and forth with coworkers. They also have more control over when they’re available to coworkers and when they’re not.
Mobile devices are part of people’s lives so why shouldn’t they be part of their workflows? Most of the content that can be embedded into Slack and Teams, including procedural checklists and videos, can also work as mLearning.
Bite-sized chunks of learning can be delivered to specific individuals and channels at key times or on a regular schedule. With the content/learning management features available through Teams, trainers can create assignments, track completion and grades, and add third-party apps.
The possibilities of these platforms are endless, and the specifics are completely customization. So take a look! Your company may already have Teams through Microsoft’s Business suite.
