You know that feeling when all eyes are on you and you don’t feel prepared? HR and learning leaders felt that way in 2020, as employee development was more challenging than ever before.
From the learning leader’s perspective, remote and hybrid onboarding is leaving new hires less engaged and not “getting it” quick enough. They also do not have the resources to provide the one-on-one support needed to help new hires figure out how to apply training to actual work scenarios. Consequentially, new hires are activated before they are ready, increasing customer and employee frustration. No one likes to fail or even struggle to figure out how to succeed. As a result, attrition accelerates, starting the process of recruiting, hiring and training all over again.
From the learner’s perspective, they arrive anxious and excited to learn, but in the remote work setting, there is less support when it comes to understanding how to apply what they are learning. They feel isolated, underprepared, scared to make a mistake and even afraid they might lose their job because of performance.
2020 changed everything: Where and how we work, and especially how we learn to work. In a survey of more than 50 learning and development leaders conducted in the fourth quarter it was revealed that more than 90 percent executed new training delivery approaches in 2020. Sixty-eight percent looked to improve engagement and performance in 2021 with fewer resources and less direct interaction. Unfortunately, engaging learners more effectively only gets you halfway there, leaving the burden of how to apply knowledge to real-world scenarios in the hands of our new hires, left to figure out how to perform better.
This challenge may require chief learning officers and learning leaders to innovate and incorporate automation through voice recognition, simulation, and assessment to achieve repetition and reinforcement of the production environment workflows for customer-facing employees. We need to provide consistent feedback at scale for situational learning to better develop job-ready employees in sales, service, support, leadership and HR roles.
Companies should consider augmenting resources and training processes with automation for the following reasons.
- CLOs, their teams and their operating partners adapted very well to COVID-19, which caused a long-term shift to remote work. More than 85 percent of learning leaders indicate they are planning for a significant increase in remote work post-pandemic, but almost half reported a decline in training effectiveness in 2020. One place to look for additional resources to support remote training is self-paced and automated training technology.
- The rush to deploy new technology and new methods of remote training delivery only addresses half of the training equation. Research shows people learn by doing: They only retain 10 percent of what they are told, and upward of 90 percent of what they do. With so much energy invested in knowledge delivery, the result was a shift to more to on-the-job learning. This means employees are learning as they interact with your customers. CLOs can empower new hires to translate learning into real-world performance while receiving greater reinforcement by automating simple to complex situational exercises and interactions.
- Companies are prioritizing better employee engagement and performance in 2021, as shared by more than 60 percent of survey respondents. While many commented on the need to better measure the impact training is having on performance, employees need more practice and repetition that come easily and at lower cost through automation and simulation. Additional research indicates employees enjoy self-paced training and recognize the impact on their performance.
- Operations teams have been implementing automation and robotics in the production environment for the past 3-5 years. Therefore, CLOs have a model to rely on and partners who have implemented both successfully and with failure. It is best when we can learn from the mistakes our peers made and best practices derived along the way.
- All too often, we schedule new-hire training to fit into standard training schedules for our facilitators. Most learning leaders are discovering that with automated role play and coaching exercises, they are spending less than 50 percent (in some cases only 20 percent) of their time delivering online lectures. This frees up resource time to work with new hires and assure they are “getting it” vs. spending so much time explaining it.
An efficient way for CLOs to provide more situational training in remote locations with less resources is to automate performance-based training. When possible, CLOs can identify ways to leverage simulation technology and voice recognition to automate role play and coaching exercises to better prepare employees.
To avoid new hires solely learning on the job, organizations have historically invested in one-on-one mentoring and role play activities so they can get as close to real-world experience as possible. However, with remote work, it is harder to provide enough support without major impact, it’s challenging to deliver consistent feedback across subject matter experts and trainers, and it’s virtually impossible to scale such resource-intensive activities.
By increasing situational repetition and delivering consistent feedback across all trainees with automation, learning leaders can have not only more time, but also the data to pinpoint where more coaching is needed. They can also more effectively validate when learners are ready to interact with customers without pulling their best performers away from customers to help assess job-readiness.
Performance-based training with automation not only saves time and resources, but it also eliminates the anxiety of being underprepared and restores satisfaction that comes with better job performance and results. With automation and digitized training, we can scale performance-based training and deliver more job-ready employees by providing the repetition, feedback and reinforcement they need to build confidence and develop skills required to perform better.
