Engage and motivate staff with the Learning Map
Have you ever been into a store, shopped online, or booked a flight, and had a bad experience? Perhaps you’ve sat in a restaurant and received shoddy service or a substandard meal. When this has happened, you have probably vowed never to visit that store or use that service again – and have told others to boycott the offending business, too. If this rings true, you’re not alone. According to a PwC survey, 32% of customers will cease to use a business after a single bad experience.
Now, apply the same principle to your employees and their experience of your training and coaching. If their learning experience at work is poor, what does it say for your business and their future within it? How many talented people might a disgruntled employee warn off from joining your organisation?
In this article, you’ll discover how the Learning Map transforms training from drab and dreary to exciting and engaging by creating a meaningful learning experience at work.
What is the learning experience at work?
Whenever your employees attend a conventional training course or event, or receive on-the-job coaching, you are providing them with a learning experience at work. This might be in a classroom setting, in team-building events, or via social interactions.
Traditionally, training delivery was designed to enable organisations to administer their training easily. It needed to ensure that people turned up at the right time and in the right place, and were given the knowledge needed for the organisation to remain compliant with its obligations. Many organisations have turned to e-learning to answer their training needs, but this has its own limitations. Online training requires greater self-discipline, with a lack of input from trainers, and a lack of flexibility in delivery.
In the modern world, especially given the complex nature of tech-savvy millennials, organisations are finding that they need to provide an engaging learning experience at work, and not simply provide training.
The learning experience at work is catching up with the customer experience in the retail environment. It’s being personalised to provide a positive and effective interaction between the learning required and the needs of the employee, with emphasis on the person rather than the content. The learning experience at work integrates personal needs, attitudes, preferences and ideas.
What does a good learning experience at work ‘look like’?
The learning experience at work is delivered along a spectrum ranging from detached lecturing to engaged interaction – notetaking memory exercise to activity-based knowledge building. It is at the interactive end of this spectrum where you will find games, simulation, discussion and other activities that form the backbone of collaborative, solution-finding learning.
When designing such learning, it is imperative that all activities support a defined purpose and lead to the end goal of each session, and then move forward to the final learning objectives. It must be balanced, deep and meaningful as well as active, to engage, motivate and inspire both the individual and the team.
The learning experience at work as a road trip
The learning experience at work is a road trip, with stopovers, rest breaks, and waypoints. Each stopover is a learning event, but not the whole journey. There is likely to be several activities on each stopover, each building toward reaching the eventual desired outcome: the road trip’s destination.
How do you design an engaging road trip?
Stopovers on road trips are not simply places to rest your head. They are destinations in themselves. Places to explore, observe and learn.
When designing an engaging road trip, you’ll seek to provide excitement and engagement along the way. You’ll prepare the route, consider the people taking the journey, and organise activities accordingly. You want your fellow travellers to enjoy themselves and remain connected throughout. This is why we focus on providing a creative and immersive learning experience at work for clients working with us – from planning, through design, launch and review.
How the Learning Map fuels your workers’ road trip
The Learning Map provides a planned route to your organisation’s learning objectives, whatever they may be. These are defined in the planning phase, along with benchmarks for measuring and evaluating progress.
We then design your LearningMap, specifically targeting development to provide opportunities for extensive and deep activity-based learning. These activities are structured to consider your learners’ emotional and cognitive needs, to provide an engaging environment in which facilitators provide the encouragement and direction for learning to take place.
As with all road trips, the Learning Map itself defines the path the travellers take to their destination. It dictates the stopovers along the way, and the activities in which travellers will participate. These stopovers and activities help the travellers to remain engaged, while enabling the driver to remain on course and assess progress at regular intervals.
The Learning Map has been used successfully by various organisations across different sectors, and for many different learning needs. As the Vice President of Operations at PepsiCo said of our work with them:
“Every operations site beat its plan for the first time ever. That’s no coincidence: the various learning maps have provided a real solution to engaging the hearts and minds of every one of our frontline employees.”
To discover how the Learning Map can similarly transform the learning experience at work in your organisation, with the potential to transform performance as it did at PepsiCo, get in touch with The Big Picture People today.
