A New Way to Grow
In a thriving hybrid environment, learning happens in real-time
“Whoever learns the fastest, wins.” — Eric Ries
As hybrid work environments become more popular and efficient, the learning and development (L&D) ecosystem continues to evolve. With the great resignation and massive reshuffling of the labor market, companies are in search of new strategies that decrease screen fatigue, digital distraction, and burnout during learning and training while promoting more meaningful workplace connections.
One increasingly popular option for companies looking to upskill and reskill their teams is digital workflow learning — platforms that streamline onboarding and optimize company education.
Both Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) and Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) embed educational milestones into employees’ regular workflows, creating more opportunities for micro-learning, reducing screen fatigue, and reprioritizing employee time. LXPs help foster healthier work-life-balance by empowering workers to spend less time in isolated virtual training environments, and more on building in-person connections at work and at home.
While finding the right fit in an LXP or DAP requires investing in L&D resources, it can become the ultimate differentiator to increase both productivity and employee wellness across your organization.
What are LXPs and DAPs?
Both LXPs and DAPs:
- Are designed around learners’ needs and built with human-centered principles at their core to promote holistic workplace wellness
- Encourage team members to focus on relevant work tasks instead of time-consuming eLearning or virtual instructor-led courses
- Provide integrated learner-centric tools that grant immediate access to micro-learning within native working systems
- Have higher success rates in employee knowledge retention and upskilling capabilities than traditional standalone LMS systems
- Give L&D departments the ability to move their organization toward a culture of continuous learning.
By meeting learners where they are in their workflows within existing systems and processes, LXPs and DAPs offer a much-needed boost for educational efficiency. These platforms rely on live tracking to connect specific actions directly to the learner’s performance data, highlighting areas where the learner can improve, and structuring the content within a learning journey around any employee’s KPIs, role, and tenure.
The success of this kind of micro-learning is bolstered by how easily it’s implemented: LXPs and DAPs are as easy to use as they are powerful. Many offer no-code solutions that integrate with existing systems, making it easy to create and publish custom content that’s both unique and relevant. Gamification is also possible, so any team can motivate and reward learning via more engaging and personalized experiences.
The specificity of real-time, individual data provides leaders with actionable business insights into overall team performance and knowledge retention throughout the organization. When strategically coupled with the immersive capabilities of an existing Learning Management System (LMS), DAPs and LXPs make it easy for people to learn in the flow of work while also decreasing screen fatigue and burnout.
The move toward micro-learning in the hybrid world
Increased burnout and screen fatigue continue to be unfortunate realities for remote and hybrid employees. By the end of this article, you’ll likely be distracted by the ping of a critical customer email or the “home” part of your home office. And that’s just in the ten minutes it’ll take you to read this, let alone during an hour-long training session that demands in-depth analysis and tunnel vision-like focus.
Rigidly structured long-form learning like webinars or eLearning modules are no longer sustainable in today’s working environments, and neither are arduous offsite trainings that are rife with unproductivity. Both have been dethroned by more flexible, personalized curriculums that lend themselves to be tailored for employee productivity instead of a one-size-fits-all approach that’s so hyper-focused on company scale that it forgoes individual growth.
Modern companies must understand how crucial it is to pivot from things like compliance training that “checks the box” to a self-paced, self-service learning methodology that promotes skill expansion complementary to existing work. The organizations that adapt their L&D strategies to this changing environment will be the ones most successful in promoting employee wellness long-term.
The original LMS was designed around the needs of managers and HR departments — mandated learning, regulatory compliance, and record-keeping — and thus, typically equipped with performance management capabilities. This type of macro-learning relied heavily on long-form content delivered via the LMS, which — while comprehensive — would often become time-consuming and convoluted. Over time, demand developed for an alternative: micro-learning is bite-sized, curated, and delivered at the point of need.
There are benefits and leading uses for each approach to learning in the professional setting. Macro-learning is great for onboarding new employees or retraining existing ones within the organization whose new positions require reskilling. Micro-learning, alternatively, is much more effective in meeting learners’ needs in the moment or when adopting a new process, software, or technology. A balance of traditional macro- and micro-learning modalities should be every organization’s goal.
How LXPs and DAPs help hybrid organizations thrive
While the hybrid work model can help organizations realize huge cost savings and provide greater work-life balance, it doesn’t translate to reduced burnout. In order to continue seeing long-term employee engagement and customer success, hybrid workplaces must leverage modern technologies that promote new ways of remote and in-person collaboration.
By redesigning how learning is delivered to mix traditional macro and micro-learning modalities orgs and their employees are happier, burn out less, and are far more engaged. In today’s hybrid working environments, we continue to seek balance in how we structure our organizations’ productivity. So too does the architecture of learning need to be thoughtfully designed with human-centered principles and the realities of the new hybrid world in mind.
Understanding how LXPs and DAPs work is a crucial first step. By providing a micro-learning structure as an alternative to bulky macro-content modules, LXPs and DAPs streamline educational content delivery by minimizing superfluous screen time. Unlike a legacy LMS in which content requires uninterrupted focus and constant toggling between work-specific and LMS content, LXPs and DAPs directly provide bite-sized experiential learning experiences that stay native to existing operating systems.
While micro-learning might be a new concept in professional environments, it’s not new when we consider how humans learn outside of K-12 and collegiate education. Let’s look to cooking as an analogy: a great existing example of micro-learning is a meal kit delivery service. Rather than spending time at the grocery store, meal-prepping in advance, and relying on in-depth instruction from a cooking class, home chefs get instructions, ingredients, and guidance right when they need them throughout the flow of preparing dinner.
Micro-learning in the workplace is similarly structured. Instead of separately focusing on long-form macro-learning modules, employees get small bursts of embedded learning content via the LXP or DAP at the exact moment it’s needed. This methodology maximizes productivity by letting you stay within your proverbial sandbox — employees stay focused on the task at hand and overcome barriers to performance quicker. Placing instructional materials directly into existing workflows and systems at the exact moment of need softens the lines between learning and execution.
Don’t just take our word for it — studies show that the ability to practice and quickly retrieve learning content dramatically increases retention of knowledge by 146% over traditional classroom-style learning. Since the initial workplace digitization, the subsequent rapid rise of the hybrid workforce has fueled a dramatic increase in LXP and DAP adoption.
How to leverage LXPs and DAPs in a hybrid world
Companies have an opportunity to architect a culture of continuous learning throughout the employee’s tenure by combining traditional LMS and macro learning modalities with LXPs and DAPs.
Many macro-learning milestones are irreplaceable, such as an organization’s ID&E policies, thorough onboarding, sharing the company culture and history, or learning the new responsibilities of a promotion. Moreover, no amount of screen time compares to meeting your team and its leaders in person. Macro-learning settings create space to ask questions, reflect on new concepts, and gain a sense of security and belonging upon joining the organization or a new team.
However, once performance expectations kick in, so should learning in the flow of work via LXPs and DAPs. Rather than returning to bloated piles of informational materials handed out during onboarding, employees can get the resources they need at their fingertips — right when they need them. Whether a lesson helps to answer a pressing customer question, grab that new line of code or formula, or learn how to use a new onboarding tool — smart and personalized recommendations make workflow learning possible.
Both LXPs and DAPs are rooted in Slalom’s L&D principles for learning work:
- Business-aligned, designed specifically to build the capabilities and skills that drive business outcomes. They are rooted in the idea that learning is a tool to drive change, adoption, and growth, and ensure learning leads to desired organizational outcomes.
- Data-informed, allowing companies to leverage metrics throughout the learning and execution process to evaluate the learner experience, behavioral changes, and progress towards business goals.
- People-centric, catering to each learner’s unique needs and constraints. These platforms are designed to support learners in the context of their unique learning persona.
- Integrated directly into the systems in which people are operating and understand that learning cannot exist in a vacuum. Learning needs to be intimately integrated with people, processes, and teams working together.
- Designed with the brain in mind, based on the insights of how the brain learns when we can quickly retrieve and practice within the flow of work. They allow you to create powerful learning strategies and experiences guided by modern neuroscience and the cognitive science of human learning.
Today, there are many fantastic LXPs and DAPs on the market to choose from, with many major companies like Salesforce, AWS, and Microsoft developing their own that integrate directly with their systems to enable employee learning during customer service or team interactions.
Conclusion
In a world where we can order groceries from our phones or talk with a delivery person through a digital doorbell, it makes sense that we want learning opportunities to also be quick, efficient, and at our fingertips. Providing opportunities to access learning in the flow of work via LXPs and DAPs has never been easier and can help overcome many challenges to L&D exacerbated by hybrid work environments.
These platforms provide bite-sized, non-intrusive, efficient learning content that meets learners where they need it most and provide business leaders with actionable insights around L&D content. Screen fatigued learners expect their leadership to invest in platforms that will help them quickly overcome knowledge gaps and give them more time to focus on their customers, personal wellness, and families. Learning in the flow of work platforms offers a solution, and Slalom can help your organization strategically implement an improved learning approach.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
