Meet Sara

Sara recently started at ‘r8me.com’, a company specialising in the collection of product and service reviews from customers on behalf of paying clients. Her job is to moderate reviews before they are published to the ‘r8me’ application. Sara didn’t really have a ‘formal’ induction into the company. The day she turned up to work two staff in her area were away and she had to spend the day buddied up with a colleague. The problem was that the colleague was so busy doing the work, that Sara found herself only able to be a passive observer.

With Sara being hired in part due to her ‘autonomous’ approach to work, she expected to independently get ‘stuck into’ her work by learning on the job. So she asked where she could go to find the company processes, work guides and other reference materials which might help her. Her supervisor pointed her to the company ‘Standard Operating Procedures Manual’ in his office shelf. “We’ve only got two of these so please return your copy before you go home. You can take it out again tomorrow but it must stay in the office and we don’t allow overnight loans.”

Pleased that she could at least make a start, Sara took the manual to her desk and started from the beginning. She spent the first hour reviewing the table of contents so as to be able prioritise what would be best to learn first. She noticed that the manual had not been updated in 5 years and wondered if the material was current. Regardless, she commenced wading through pages. Sara groaned to herself as she realised how challenging it was going to be to take in everything - too much writing, no pictures, no video to get the message across…

What’s the problem to solve here?

Typically businesses are willing to invest in finding the right people and underestimate the importance of memorable learning experiences backed up with continuous access to reference materials. Poor or inefficient training ultimately can result in frustrated staff and/or unhappy customers. Either way, the return on the ‘people’ investment is not realised, as without the necessary reference tools they cannot reach their best productivity.

10 tips to make reference materials rate:

Let’s look at how to improve Sara’s situation: an out-of-date dusty manual in the Supervisor’s office, only available during business hours. These 10 simple actions could be implemented to vastly improve her ‘learning’ experience:

1. Make it first. Use Buddy training as the second stage of learning once an initial period of ‘self-learning’ has been completed.

2. Make it digital. Hard copy manuals, aside from gathering dust, are rarely user-friendly to reference in practice and are difficult to keep updated.

3. Make it available. Hard copy manuals are not visible at all times or in multiple locations to suit the learner. They should be available 24/7, wherever needed and on popular devices.

4. Make it efficient. Hard copy manuals can be unwieldy and are difficult to reference out to other associated information. Footnotes and appendices are far less user friendly than a hyperlink out to other sources. It is for these reasons that they often become very large and are full of repetitive instructions. Again very challenging to administer and keep updated.

5. Make it simple. With competition for attention at an all time high both in and out of the business, making reference materials easy to consume is absolutely critical.

6. Make it visual. Relevant images not only break up text but they are an effective way to retain information.

7. Make it move. Video for training, is a powerful and succinct way to convey standardised learning messages.

8. Test it. Allow users to self-check if they understand key concepts with short quizzes injected into the learning journey.

9. Bring it together in one place. Staff should not have to hunt for reference materials across numerous platforms. They need a single ‘place’ to go to where all reference materials are available and point from for other instructions.

10. Leverage it. Create training materials which can be used for ongoing reference in practice in the business, not just for a finite period of ‘training’.