In the rush to be an agile company that adopts new learning technologies, creates hundreds of new courses, and disseminates them rapidly; we sometimes forget that training needs to be first and foremost about helping employees solve their day-to-day issues, and then everything else.
Currently, it takes far too many clicks to find the learning content that employees need. And the content is so tedious and long that the employee’s attention is not retained for long. Also, at a time when the average knowledge worker is struggling to set aside time (just five minutes per day) for formal learning, the traditional learning system is quite redundant.
As an L&D pro, it is your responsibility to not just “train” employees but actually create an environment conducive to learning and improved productivity. This would mean everything from rewarding employees for teaching others to adopt new learning tools that enable ‘learning in the flow of work’.
Today, in this webinar we’ll be discussing all about learning in the flow of work and the idea of Digital Adoption Platforms that complement the existing systems training by overlaying on top of the application and guiding users contextually, thereby enabling learning in the flow of work.
Gokul
Let me introduce our speakers for the day. Let me first start with Chris Christopher. So Christopher is the Global Head of digital learning at GE Healthcare. And he has been with GE for almost four years now, prior to which he was heading learning and talent development at Abbey and various other organizations. And Chris is also the host of the popular L&D webinars learning tech talks, which he runs alongside his learning, advisory learning sharks. And unlike most of the L&D leaders, Chris loves technology, as you can see from the webinar, where he hosts various learning technologies and works closely with business operation leaders and you know, what’s, what accountable outcomes, right, so we can’t wait to hear some crazy amazing ideas and your vision for L&D Chris.
Chris
You’re setting the bar really high right now. So hopefully I can deliver on that one.
Gokul
Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. And hosting, which would be our Senior Vice President at Whatfix Vispi Daver. He’s a seasoned sales leader with about two decades of experience and works with the sales team of Whatfix in with global thousand prospects and customers across verticals and industries, right so with Whatfix Vispi has been passionately helping people adopt the concept of learning in the flow of work and the digital adoption platforms. Right. So Vispi, let me just sit back and what’s now the floor is all yours.
Vispi
Great Gokul. Thanks a lot for that introduction. Chris. I’m really excited for this session. One is I’ve listened to some of your webinars more recently and found it incredibly valuable, very interactive. You brought some great leaders, learning and development leaders to talk about topics that are very relevant to them. So maybe I’ll start with just give us an Introduction to learning tech talks. What is it? How do you bring in leaders into that? And how do you decide on what topics to talk about?
Chris
Yeah. So you know, it’s funny, it started, actually, it started when my wife went into labor with our fifth, right, I knew I was going to be on paternity leave. And so I thought, you know what, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time, let’s just do it, because I’m gonna have some time to actually get it started. But really, the whole goal of it was, you know, I was looking at what was going on in the industry and not everyone in our field came from a technical background. So this whole digital transformation can feel a little bit scary. And you know, it’s unknown territory, and I thought, you know what I can help, right, I’ll help break it down for people and make it simple, and hopefully get their questions answered and serve as kind of an advocate on behalf of the industry by talking to the vendors and the people who were doing all this kind of crazy stuff and help people understand what it was. So it was more of a passion project that I wasn’t really sure if anybody would care to listen anyway. And I would have done it whether people did or not. So that’s kind of the backstory behind it.
Vispi
Great. So Chris, I heard one question that really stood out when I listen to one of the tech talks. I’m gonna ask that to you. So what’s something that people assume about you that’s not true? I noticed you’re putting your interviewees on the spot asking that question. So I had to ask that a few as well.
Chris
So I won’t copy my answer from the show, which was people think I go by, Chris, and I don’t. But I think one of the things is because I’m really into technology, there is one assumption that actually it’s relevant to this whole digital thing. There’s one assumption, a lot of people think I’m like, anti in person. And granted, I’m an introvert, so I’m totally fine with not necessarily getting together with people all the time. But for me, the assumption is I’m pro digital, anti-non-digital and for me, I just see digital solves so many problems and if we start asking the question, what are we trying to solve for then let’s figure out what the best way is. If it’s not a digital solution, so be it. Like, I’m not gonna push digital for the sake of digital. But that is an assumption because I’m the digital learning Tech Talk guy that everything I do is digital. And really, it’s not.
Vispi
So great, Chris. Let’s jump into the topic at hand. So learning in the flow of work, new nomenclature that’s come up with a new acronym that’s come up as well. So maybe you can explain your definition of it. And why it’s trending and why it’s a trending idea these days?
Chris
Oh, well, I mean, in terms of I think sometimes we overcomplicate it. So in terms of defining it, it’s not simply, stepping away from your work and doing learning where you’re working, I think that’s learning close to the flow of work, which is important, too, right? We’re trying to bring learning as close to the flow of work as possible. Learning in the flow of work to me is where you’re not actually stopping the work. It’s literally happening seamlessly, which is, right where, Whatfix digital adoption platforms play, right, instead of stopping you from what you’re doing and jumping out of that work and going and doing something else. I think augmented reality is another learning in the flow of work type tool where it’s actually enabling you to do the work in the flow of what you’re doing versus disrupting it. So that’s where I distinguish between learning near the flow of work and in the flow of work, and they’re both there’s not one that’s better than the other. It’s just for different purposes. So I guess that’s my definition of what it would be and why it’s trending? Well, I mean, realistically, I think people have always wanted this. I don’t think it’s a new thing. Like suddenly people go, you know what I really want to not do is be disrupted to have to go learn something. I mean, there’s a reason Google’s so popular. So I think this has been something people have been hungry for a long time. I think where it’s really at the height of its attention right now is with everything going on with COVID with everything going on with all these other things, there’s an unprecedented demand for efficiency and how do we you know, people are looking for it because they’re busy with 9 million other things. So people are always looking for how can I develop and grow well, not necessarily having to stack more on top of what I’m already doing.
Vispi
Let’s see if you agree with this postulate, as well, Chris. So learning before the flow of work seems to be the norm these days. And we have a really good chart that prospects really like it’s very simple. It’s a Y-axis there is your peak knowledge or the level of knowledge you have on a certain project or task or technology. And on the x-axis is time. And the idea is that before you actually start working, is in general, the incumbent way where it’s your peak knowledge of any task before you’ve logged into a software application ever is where all the learning occurs. And once you log in that learning declines because of memory, etc. And people trying to inject learning in the flow of work for after you’ve actually launched into your software application or your project rather than having it all upfront. Because you need to know how to do something when you need to do it. Not before you even access the particular software application. Does that make sense? Do you agree with that?
Chris
Yeah, so I came from the software world early on. And that was one of my biggest challenges when you were in the software space was, you go in, I was implementing software in hospitals and surgery centers, and you’d go to try and teach people how to use this software, they don’t remember it. I mean, we all know this, we like to think that they do and if we improve what we tell them, and it can help, and not that you don’t tell them anything, but the reality is they don’t retain it. So it was always one of my frustrations. And I was always looking at trying to put the learning in the flow of work through performance support through spacing out learning, but we were limited. We didn’t have the technology we did back then to be able to truly put it in the flow of work. So I would agree, that the way we’ve been doing it isn’t the best way. Sometimes I differentiate between some of the people who are pretty tough critics on our industry is we didn’t use to have a lot of good options for alternatives, right? So it was like, it was the way we were doing it out of necessity, or out of we didn’t really know what else to do. And I think now tech is opening the door to say, well, we can think differently about it. And there are better ways to do it.
Vispi
Yeah. And also for the audience that the other concept that intersects here is, microlearning as well, because learning in the flow of work means learning any particular task when you need it in a microlearning format, just in time learning as well as another way to put it. I’ll also add, Chris, that in a post COVID environment, all of this is exacerbated because the number of in the case of software products, the number of products that we have to use and have access to has increased. Gartner had this great report, pre-COVID that the average employee has to access 14 different software applications to get their job done at an enterprise. And I’d argue that that’s now even increased more. Now there’s collaboration applications, video conferencing, etc, that all the average employee has to deal with. Their entire onboarding experience now has to be done remotely. More software means harder to utilize them as a good example of more use cases for learning the flow of work. Would you agree with that?
Chris
Yes, a little bit differently, though, right? I see this in a lot of trends where they really weren’t trends that weren’t there, we just might not have seen them. So I think where it’s changed is a lot of these apps existed before, but two things have dramatically changed. One, you didn’t necessarily used to have to use them, right? Like all these digital collaboration tools. Most organizations have had teams and you know, these other apps, but people didn’t really use them as much because they didn’t have to, they’d walk over to the person’s desk. And that walking over to the person’s desk was also in many regards how people got around. I don’t know how to do this stuff, right. We just didn’t see it. And people had that luxury So when they were trying to put in an expense report and say, how do I do this? They didn’t have to go look for a solution. They just went and asked, you know, Bill in accounting, like, can you help me with this real quick? That was like the organic performance support that suddenly got blown up. And I think that’s where, yeah, now it’s at an apex where people need better solutions because they’re learning how to readjust to this.
Vispi
So Chris, I’ll move on a little bit in, in practicality, how are organizations utilizing this concept of learning in the flow of work? And have you seen some best practices as well? Probably a good time where you could explain learning sharks as well and the consulting work you do there and have there ever been any learning in the flow of work projects there as well.
Chris
So there have been a handful and I’ve done them over the course of my career. And this is where again, I would differentiate between learning near the flow of work to learning in the flow of work, right. So to me when I’m talking about learning in the flow of work, I’m talking about it is literally supporting you in real-time through what you’re doing. So, from a use case standpoint, especially around systems, I’m a big fan of digital adoption platforms for that very reason, right? I mean, the technology when it comes to software, and things like that, to me is massive. And for multiple organizations, I’ve helped them say, hey, you used to do system training, let’s dump it, let’s dump the traditional systems training approach. Let’s create microlearning whatever you want to call it, to create some learning near the flow of work, that we can kind of give people options if they need to kind of step away from what they’re doing and bring that knowledge up. Or we can count on the digital adoption platform to truly provide that real-time guidance. You’re trying to do this thing, let me walk you through that so that you don’t have to go learn, then come back and try and do it and you made a mistake and you go back so you’re not disrupting that flow. So to me, digital adoption platforms are one of the biggest trends that I’ve been pushing for years, not just recently not just post COVID, I’ve been saying if you’re doing anything with softwares, and you’re not considering a digital adoption platform to me that’s it needs to be part of the conversation. I think the other one that is still growing in popularity that I don’t think people have quite clicked into. I did an episode recently on this was augmented reality is to me, right? DAPs work fantastic in the software world. To me, there’s no better solution in the software world. In the real world, you don’t have a DAP right? Not in the same way. And I think that’s where augmented reality can start to create that real-time guidance for hey, I’m trying to do this thing. Now that’s use case-specific you have to ask – Where are people? What are they doing? Do they run into that kind of stuff? But when you think about manufacturing, when you think about some of these other fields where people are actually walking around doing things to me, augmented reality can be the DAP of real life.
Vispi
Yeah, I’ll comment on the DAP. So what Chris is talking about for the audience, DAP is also a new category, it’s called Digital adoption platforms. And it’s particular to the software products that have been purchased or built internally in an enterprise. And what DAP technologies do is they provide an overlay on top of those software applications that guide users in real-time, contextually, through learning, support and help content. And the idea of DAPs is that you can, as Chris mentioned, complement the existing systems training that you have near the flow of work or before the flow of work with this overlay technology that can guide you contextually while you’re in the flow of work. And our company Whatfix provides this digital adoption platform technology. This is used widespread by fortune 1000 companies for a variety of applications – could be applications you purchase like your CRM, HR, it could be ones that you built as well. So that’s the DAP landscape. And the augmented reality landscape, as Chris mentioned, as well, is a really great compliment outside of the software paradigm as well.
Chris
Well, one of the things I’m gonna jump on this one too with the software’s piece because a lot of times it does, it is hard for people to get it to click like – So what exactly does this do? And why does this really matter? But one use case where we put this into play. Because a lot of times I feel like we struggle with articulating the value of what we’re doing, right? We say, well, we want to use this or we think we can do this, but our business stakeholders are saying but why, like what return are we going to get. And in one example where we put this to work was with a very highly regulated system where we were doing things that had dire consequences when we did them wrong. And so we were able to actually track inefficiencies that we did. And that’s how we build the business case. We said, if we use a DAP, we can validate the data that’s being put in and actually stop people from making mistakes before they get all the way through the process, which is actually costing us massive time, money, things like that. We were actually able to quantify if we could reduce the number of errors by X percent, we can actually save or generate this much more revenue. And we did we actually blew our target out of the water because we were actually stopping problems in the chain before they actually caused consequential problems down. And I think that’s where that kind of real-time guidance for people is huge because we don’t realize the consequences that happen when people make mistakes and systems.
Vispi
Yeah, that’s really good. We didn’t talk about the benefits of learning in the flow of work. But Chris touched on that for sure. Its data integrity was one that Chris mentioned, which is again, preventing mistakes from happening inside the software applications. Getting people to use the adoption of the application itself, making sure people use it. And then, of course, the benefits around reducing any kind of support costs associated with it. Also adding that the learning and development professionals can create training content in the application as well. So a long list of potential benefits as well. So Chris, if I as an L&D professional in the audience, it’s the first time I’m hearing about learning in the flow of work., what aspects should I consider in terms of adopting it? What should I do internally? How should I promote this internally in my organization with my CLO, what’s a good way to get started?
Chris
Wow, that’s a good question. Where to start with it. You know, if it’s complete foreign territory, I’m a big fan of storytelling, right? And anybody who knows me personally knows, right. I love telling stories. And I think that’s a big part of it. Because I think sometimes when we talk about this stuff, we talk about it very technically, or we talk about it in, you know, learning or HR speak these big words that don’t necessarily have a lot of tangible meaning. And, you know, I think one good way to do it is to really identify some practical pain points in the system. Now, this means getting to know the flow of work, right? The biggest first step is if you don’t know the flow of work in your organization, you need to learn the flow of work. If you’re going around talking about we need to do learning the flow of work and you can’t say what that flow looks like, well that’s a natural first step. So I guess, once you can actually do that you can start to identify what are some of these pain points, right, this is the work that’s happening. This is where it’s breaking down. This is where things are going south. And what you can do with that is, and I think this has been one of the most compelling aspects I’ve used to help transform this stuff is tell those stories, right. Tell those powerful stories of this is what’s happening and make up a character if you need to write this person, and this is what they’re dealing with, and then tell the story of how what you could do could change that. And one that’s going to help you as a professional start to reimagine the possibilities, right? Because when you think about it, learning in the flow of work, I don’t know that anybody would say – no thanks. I want more interruptions and disruptions to getting the work done that I need to do. I don’t know anybody who’s saying that, right. So logically, when you start thinking that way, it makes sense. But I think sometimes that message gets lost because we don’t tell it as a story of, here’s what’s happening, here’s how we could change it and imagine this is what it could look like in the future. Suddenly, now you have people’s attention and it starts becoming like, well, how, how would we do that? What would that look like? And you can start building on that and over time, right? The dominoes, just topple
Vispi
Thanks. Are there other LnD methodologies, Chris, that intersect well with learning in the flow of work. You mentioned AR being separate, but I was thinking more like video and microlearning on video or any other LnD technologies or methodologies that intersect well with learning in the flow of work.
Chris
So really, and again, I think this depends on how sometimes people look at these taxes competing tech, right? Like, well, you’ve got this and it’s fighting with this and then what do we do. I think you can integrate it right. So to your point of mediums, other types of things, we have a lot of good content, a lot of times, especially around systems, we generate a fair amount of good content, we have this stuff. So I think naturally, what you can do with it is you can pair the two together, right? It doesn’t have to be a competition. And a lot of times I say throw system training out, to start just to get people to break the mindset of starting with that, and being like let’s do that first, well no let’s think differently first, and then maybe let’s back into it. But yeah, I mean, I still when we’ve implemented or when I’ve implemented the past, we still had video tutorials, we still had little guides, user guides, performance guides, because some people want to be able to download it and you know, keep it somewhere where they can reference it, or they may want to see a video of somebody doing it, but what it does, and to me, this is the biggest thing, it opens the door for personalization, right? So you can then say, hey, let’s create these other things that we were doing, let’s put it closer to the flow of work so people can do that but then people can choose what they need and what they need most. So I think it doesn’t necessarily stop the work you’re doing, it may reduce it, hopefully, it does. Hopefully, it reduces some of the waste that we put into trying to do this stuff so we can focus on other things, but I think, you can pair pretty much anything that we’re doing with these still do webinars, you can still do other things. The focus on them may be different though.
Vispi
The personalization angle, Chris, that you mentioned is incredibly important. And it’s another layer in the benefits of learning in the flow of work that I wanted to touch on. So personalization or contextualization, based on who you are, your role. So Chris says head of digital transformation in his organization, or me as head of sales in the same organization, because of our two different roles, we should have different learning in the flow of work. And that can be provided with learning in the flow of work technologies as well. So coming back to our software analogy, if I log into a software solution like Microsoft Teams, or any kind of collaboration tool, I should see certain learning in the flow of work content based on my role in sales that Chris shouldn’t see. And he should see a different set of learning in the flow of work content based on his role, that becomes possible with learning in the flow of work technologies in this case digital adoption, really powerful, something you cannot do without adopting one of these solutions. So personalization or contextualization, by who you are and role really more important. And envision now as L&D professionals how that further hits the middle of the bat in terms of the benefits of making sure that you have just in time learning again, personalized for you microlearning again, personalized contextualized for you so really powerful.
Chris
Another thing I was gonna add, if I can jump on top of that, right, because to me, there’s two levels of personalization and you hit on one, right there’s two angles of it, there’s, I’m head of digital learning, transformation and you are in sales. Our roles may be different but even if there was a Christopher Lind, head of digital technology and learning, and then there’s a whatever head of Digital Learning and Technology, our experiences are going to be completely different and our knowledge sets are going to be different, and where these technologies can actually allow you to give feedback and change what support you need, right? That’s another level of personalization that really, truly only tech can get to. You look at some of these like, well, we can create a different training plan for a salesperson versus a, you know, learning person. Yeah, you might be able to do that using traditional means but what you can’t do is say, what about two learning people that have vastly different experiences? That’s, that’s a level of personalization that is, in my opinion, impossible to get to without tech.
Vispi
Yeah, really good. So let’s take this level of personalization one level further. So now we’ve talked about personalization at the role level based on who you are, but how about personalization based on where you are in the software application. So let’s stay with our team’s analogy. If I’m in a certain tab in teams, I need to know certain content associated with that tab if I want to create a group around Microsoft Teams and launch a group around sales, how do I go about that? So again, learning in the flow of work technologies, like digital adoption, allow that as well. Personalization based on where you are in the software tool, because when I’m in location A, I only need learning support and training content associated with location A, and nothing else. So again, that additional layer of personalization being a big benefit there.
Let’s move on to the final measuring, you know, that’s the value exercise, Chris, that we all do and L&D as with any customer would be interested in doing that, after deploying to solutions, technologies, consulting around learning the flow for what’s the best way to measure its effectiveness?
Chris
So I would say if you’re looking to measure its effectiveness after you’ve rolled it out, you’ve already kind of made some misstep. Especially when you look at some of these technologies is instead of looking at it as, we’ve done this, what kind of return can we prove based on what’s happened? I would say start there. This is actually a practical piece of advice, especially around digital adoption platforms, because I’ve run into this before, it can become overwhelming by the number of things you could create like walkthroughs or support for, you can quickly become well, we should make one for this and that. And you’re not thinking about all the support that goes into it and are people actually going to use this and things like that. And so when you start having that measurement conversation upfront and say, what are the things that we don’t want to happen in the system? Or if it’s an existing system, what are the things that are broken today that we want to fix? Like, let’s build our strategy around that instead of saying let’s make a billion different things and then let’s roll it out and then see what happens and then try and figure out which ones work. So I think that’s probably the first step is to say, what problems are you trying to solve through this? And that makes the measurement question really easy. So going back to my example, earlier, where one of the pain points we were trying to fix was that we were getting submissions going out the door incorrectly, and they were bouncing back, because we filled in wrong data. So that was one of our measurements. We knew we were submitting things with this many errors. We wanted to reduce that by 20%. And we could do that first pass submission, would result in this much more revenue and things like that. So I think that’s kind of the mindset you almost have to bring to this. Now some of them have to do with adoption, right. You look at I think of a workday rollout where I’ve been involved with recently and one of the things that people were thinking about is, what metrics do we want? We’re moving on to workday, we know new people need to get in there, what are some things that we just know? Not all of them have to have some quantifiable business metric thing. Right? Some of them are just, we want people to go in and do this with their employees within the first 30 days or something like that. Some of those things, you start mapping out those things of these are the adoption points, we know we need to hit adoption milestones we want to hit along the way so let’s build that into this. And then let’s measure it and then measurements are easy because all you’re doing is looking at the data you already knew you were going to be getting.
Vispi
You mentioned something really important around rollouts. So again, for the L&D folks in the room, rollouts at implementation, or even after implementation, it’s not just for when you’re rolling it out. It could be you’ve had a technology in place for a few years and you want to increase adoption, could be for new users getting onboarded on the application as well. So the entire gamut of the software product lifecycle.
Chris
I’ve used it extensively too, right? You have a lot of these software’s you come out with major releases, interface changes, things are over here, what’s the way we normally approach it? We send out an email or we create an eLearning and we assign it out and we hope everybody remembers it. You can completely move away from that because if it’s a point release, and it’s not something major, the first time they hit that system, they get that guidance and say, Hey, here’s what’s changed, you know, and you’re good to go. It really does change the user experience pretty dramatically.
Vispi
Last question on my end before I turn it back over to Gokul for audience questions. So shifting away from learning the flow of work and going back to learning charts and learning tech talks. So we talked about learning tech talks, I’d strongly encourage every L&D professional to subscribe to it. It’s really informative with great videos from founders, CEOs, learning professionals on topics related to learning and development. Chris, tell us a little bit about learning sharks. Firstly, why the name and what does learning sharks do as opposed to learning tech talks?
Chris
So the start of learning sharks came and I won’t mention where because it’s been around for longer than that. But anyway, the thing that originally started with was, I was doing a lot of speaking and one organization was trying to, like, ask a lot of questions, they wanted to review what I was talking about. And I said I’m just gonna come up with a company so instead of speaking on behalf, I didn’t want to get into any trouble. So I’m like, I’ll just make a company and honestly, the name came from my wife’s amazing and shoot, she was looking for domain names, and she was like, we were into Shark Tank at the time. And she saw it and she’s like, what about learning shark it’s just clicked like that’s super cool, right? Like I like it. I’m big on puns so like the whole, you know, take a bite out of learning, right? I mean, it was just I’m like, this is great, it’s fine. So there’s really no like deep, you know, meaningful history behind learning sharks, especially because at the time I’m like, I’m not really gonna do much with it.
Where it’s growing? It’s growing in a lot of different ways. I really care a lot about our industry and want to see things change, but not for any reason other than I think we have a massive opportunity to help our organizations, and I grew up in it. And I know that this is scary territory for people. So I started it to help. I started that’s learning tech talks grata learning sharks. I said, here’s a channel, something I can do. I started a slack community out of learning sharks and like it’s a water cooler for L&D, a cool place people can come ask questions and get answers to things. People started reaching out to being like, could you help us with stuff? I’m like, Yeah, okay, So it kind of just became the umbrella of, you know, I guess sharks are kind of like an aggressive animal. But it’s like, well, that really wasn’t the point. I guess it was more to be like, this is where you can come get help with what you’re doing. So what that means for the future? TBD, TBD. I’ll just say that for now.
That’s a wrap…
I hope the ideas that we discussed today in this webinar could change the taste of learning in the flow for you. We also conducted an amazing Q&A session after the webinar which you can listen to in the webinar recording here. And for all the audience who may have questions on learning in the flow of work, you can connect with Chris or Vispi via LinkedIn or even send us an email and we’ll be happy to help you.
If you’re looking for a Digital Adoption Platform(DAP) to streamline a digital adoption across your enterprise applications, then do check out Whatfix. We have something really interesting there for you.
