Despite a limited budget and a history of “check the box” training, Aristocrat Technologies organization wanted to increase just-in-time training by providing easy to consume nuggets. Management wanted tests that showed that workers knew the content at a specific point in time, but were less concerned with the worker knowing the content when needed. It wanted to find ways to address these just-in-time needs while still providing the content knowledge expectations desired by management.

Employee errors are no joke! Simple mistakes can affect customer satisfaction while refunds or returns affect the bottom line. While changing human behavior to reduce common mistakes in the work process is the ideal, sometimes you simply can’t. When faced with this challenge, Deluxe Corp. looked to performance support for an answer.

With employees unable to retrieve up to 90 percent of information from initial onboarding, organizations need a way to reinforce training programs for maximum knowledge retrieval and provide support to ensure reps are fully productive, all at less cost. Moreover, learning management systems are not innate to the daily rituals of workers and as a result, there is a disconnect between training and the workforce.

You need a performance support solution, but getting approval to implement a larger, more costly solution takes time—if you have the budget at all. But maybe you don’t need the larger, more costly system. Maybe you can start your performance support journey using tools you already have available.

In large organizations, learning and performance support content typically develops over time in an organic, ad-hoc fashion until one day the organization realizes it has an unmoderated mass of content stored on file servers, intranet sites, and the LMS. As a result, employees don’t know what’s available and can’t find the content they need when they need it, falling back on familiar and possibly incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated information. To the organization, the task of making this mass of content easily accessible, usable, and targeted to workflow performance can be daunting, to say the least. Where and how to start?

Your organization has been using performance support for some time. You’ve got resources and tools in place that are well received, and the buzz around what you’re doing seems overwhelmingly positive. It’s time to take your efforts to the next level. Anecdotal feedback is valuable, but most organizations need verifiable, data-driven analytics for major enterprise applications. 

Everyone wants just-in-time learning at the moment of need. Google set the expectation for this. “What I want to know, when I want to know it, and how I choose to learn it” is not only what employees expect, but this model has proven to improve business outcomes. As a learning leader you want to provide a performance support learning model, but that requires executive support, funding, IT support, and more. A performance support model requires changing the conversation with all the stakeholders.

The meteoric rise of mobile devices has opened up the opportunity make on-the-job performance support practical. The challenge is to get the right amount of the right content to the right place at the right time to enable improved performance and on-the-job learning.