Now more than ever, organizations have an opportunity to deploy microlearning best practices to engage and coach remote teams to improve business productivity. Managers play a central role in supporting employees with remote learning and coaching them towards reaching their goals as a part of achieving organizational objectives.
But how can managers coach effectively when their team is overwhelmed by information and other distractions while working from home? There’s only so much information that employees can digest in a day, so how can managers ensure that their coaching offers direction towards productivity.
The solution to engage remote teams is knowledge, information, and clear communication. Here are ways that leaders can use best practice microlearning to engage, inspire, develop and lead their teams.
Driving Engagement in Learning: Develop without Distracting
It’s so easy to share information. Oftentimes, there’s too much information coming from different sources, sent by too many people. With the internet’s democratization of data and information, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Managers struggle to keep employees focused, engaged, and equipt with the right information they need to do their jobs properly. They can overcome this challenge by incorporating microlearning to deliver the information they need their employees to know in short, focused pieces of content. In order to have employees recall the information for when they need it, scientifically proven learning methodologies must be applied to increase how much information can be digested and retained. Learning must be applied as a challenge and include gamification to drive engagement while making it a continuous activity. In this sense, microlearning isn’t just a trend of shrinking a lot of the same old content that’s out there, it’s about engaging and focusing on the information that matters most, the things you can’t afford for them to forget.
In a busy world in which managers must compete to get their employees’ attention. Microlearning is necessary to prompt engagement and stay productive. This form of learning has been scientifically proven through clinical trials that demonstrate the principles of microlearning actually stick to people. The core principles of microlearning include:
- Make it a challenge: instead of pushing more passive content at employees, foster active thinking by composing microlearning as a scenario-based challenge.
- Make it short: everyone appreciates brevity; quick learning exercises eliminate any excuse to complain about training. This happens when employees are forced to use a traditional learning system because it takes them away from customers and prospecting.
- Make it meaningful: the best microlearning programs are relevant to situations faced at work. It should be the information that matters most and help your teams put learning into practice.
- Make it adaptive: when someone responds to a microlearning challenge they will receive it again until they have demonstrated mastery of that concept. Adaptive microlearning gives immediate feedback after a response to a challenge and then reveals the right answer in real-time. This gives an opportunity for them to respond to the challenge again after a spaced time interval, thereby improving long-term knowledge retention.
- Make it a competition: most people are naturally competitive, and this natural competitiveness is proven to drive engagement by displaying individual and team leaderboard progress.
A Managers Role in Coaching Through Microlearning
The purpose of microlearning is not only to deliver and reinforce critical information but it goes beyond that. All the responses data that is captured on proficiency levels translates to valuable insights that managers need to be effective coaches. Are your teams gaining the proficiency they need to perform? Are there areas where additional learning investments are needed? And now managers have precise data points on areas where they need to invest more time coaching a specific individual or team.
Microlearning provides managers with a flexible and more focused method for coaching their remote teams. Qstream enables managers with coaching and insights into their teams’ knowledge and capabilities. Qstream actively engages managers and enables them to be better coaches in the process. They don’t find out that a team member has a knowledge gap retroactively in a report when it’s too late. Managers receive proactive alerts and reports to indicate where coaching opportunities exist. These include positive data points for encouraging and acknowledging employees who are excelling or those who need additional support on a specific topic. The ability to focus manager coaching efforts in a fact-based way is especially important in a remote learning situation. Managers can use this information to have targeted conversations on specific topics where knowledge gaps are identified and areas that will have the biggest impact on their performance.
In this sense, Qstream microlearning is also intended to engage managers in the effort to grow the overall proficiency of the entire organization. Manager engagement is key to understanding the value of what information and learning is being expected of remote learners and in order to understand it, it’s critical for managers to be involved in a learning program.
Analytics for Visibility into Organizational Performance Readiness
Data on individuals’ proficiency levels gives managers the ability to have targeted, personalized coaching conversations to support remote employees. These analytics are used by managers to deliver targeted coaching to make sure people are practicing the right behaviors. Having these targeted conversations related to individuals learning needs will get them to practice the right behaviors to successfully do their job.
