Think about how people navigate to sites in their personal usage. They either have a site saved to their favourites, or more commonly, they search for it on Google and get what they’re looking for as the top result.

It’s different for work-based tools. Internal resources don’t usually appear in Google results because they sit behind organisational firewalls, commonly on intranets or learning management systems.

Still, there are a couple of useful guidelines to follow when setting up your online resource for success. The biggest of these, by far, is the main reason why many initiatives fizzle and die. It’s all about where employees access the resource from.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen a really great resource buried away on an intranet. In order to access, say, a support tool for performance management, an employee might have to go to their intranet, the HR page, the L&D section of the HR page, the performance management section of the L&D page, and in a dense list of blue links, somewhere in the middle will be another blue link that says “performance management tool”.

This, to put it finely, is not optimal. And there’s plenty that can be done about that.

Links can be turned into attractive buttons or banners, icons can be designed and deployed. Useful, important or timely resources can be pushed up the intranet hierarchy for a period of intense promotion.

And there’s plenty more that can be done. Shortcut icons can be delivered to employee’s desktops, resources can be added to employees’ browser favourites, and you can ensure that the resource is easily discoverable via the intranet search feature (if it ever gets used).

All these solutions require a strong relationship with your IT department, but this is easier to achieve than many people’s experience would suggest. In many organisations we’ve worked with, the IT department wants to be understood, but also challenged. They really do want to solve their internal client’s problems. Key to making that happen is to be able to speak in their language. You either need to be able to do that yourself, have someone in your team to do that or work with an external expert to help you build that relationship.

Because, if making things happen on the intranet needs a strong relationship with IT, for the next path to success it’s absolutely vital.

As with most things in life, there’s often a balance to be struck between access, security, measurement and cost.

Just as the best food is most often artery clogging, so the ideal solution to accessing an online resource has its pitfalls.

Let’s start with the ideal scenario: the employee launches the resource from any device, they are taken to the resource without having to log in or go through any hoops, and the system knows who the employee is.

Great, and that’s a feasible case in many situations if you have a decent, open-standards authentication service, you only access from within the organisation’s network, and whoever has developed the online resource can support the authentication protocol.

Those conditions don’t occur very often. So, let’s look at some potential pitfalls.

If at all possible, do not force the employee to gather up yet another username and password. This is a major blocker to engagement. If you absolutely cannot avoid it, then make the password retrieval process as painless as possible.

Single sign-on systems are a great idea if they’re already in place. Most providers should be able to integrate with them and they mean the user is interfacing with the resource in a familiar way. It also means that you can get the best of both worlds, individual tracking and personalised access.

It should be noted that this may cost a bit more, but if you’re investing in the resource, you don’t want to see that investment wasted for the sake of an integration fee.

However, before you do that at all, there’s a critical question you have to ask yourself. How important is it that you have individual tracking of this resource? Is it really important that you can tell James Smith from accounts watched a video on communication skills on the 23rd November 2012? Or is it more important that you can tell the resistance to change video has seen an increase in usage of 1500% in the last few weeks?

The second measurement is easily achieved. The first is more difficult and causes the imposition of passwords or costly authentication systems.

These are genuine questions to ponder and, in the main, when we’ve been asked to provide individual user reporting, it rarely gets used compared with the more general trends that we can pick out from something like Google Analytics.

Whatever you decide, you want to reduce the barriers between the user and the resource they are trying to access

So what about the health signals for this condition?

Visits are still the primary signal. If this is low you need to look at both the first two conditions for online engagement.

It’s as important to know how many people are visiting the page the they need to access the resource from as it is to know how many people are visiting the actual resource. If the launch page gets 5,000 visits and the resource just 500, it could be that it’s not prominent enough, or it’s not clear exactly what it is. The key is to understand the whole journey the employee takes and where they fall off.

Bounce rate is one of those metrics that are a useful signal but can mean a number of things. Put simply, a bounce is a visit to your resource where the user doesn’t go any further than the first page they visit. This could mean they’re just having a nosey, but it can also mean that you’re not getting the signalling right from where the user is launching the resource from. They might click on a link expecting to see a checklist, for example, and actually be taken to an e-learning module.

Finally, if you have one, a high number of visits to the forgotten login page of your resource can be a signal that you need to improve the access route to your resource. Again, this links in closely to the requirement for a password or use of single sign-on solutions.

These signals aren’t a definitive guide, they’re just useful metrics that we’ve learned to look at over the years. They require a degree of interpretation, but the more you analyse them, the better your interpretation gets.

And it’s here that we reach the end of this particular series. As I mentioned at the start, this is a tale of two halves. Yes, you need to follow good analysis and design principles when building any online intervention. But even then, you still need to get people to visit your resources in order for them to add value.

For both to-site and on-site engagement, however, you don’t have to break new ground every time.

Companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon spend millions in experimenting and developing new strategies to engage their users. They have clear strategies to get people to visit their sites and, what’s more, they have honed their user interfaces over many years. On the enterprise side, giving employees familiar user interfaces and navigation mechanisms they’re familiar with from these companies can allow you to shortcut the need to invest heavily in UI experts.

I hope these posts have been thought-provoking and useful. If you want to chat about anything discussed in this series about online engagement, leave a comment or get in touch.

The post The Second Condition of Online Engagement: Access appeared first on GoodPractice.

In my first post, I introduced a model for looking at online engagement and the pre-conditions that must exist for a successful implementation. I’m now going to look at the first condition: the need for the employee to know about the resource and think it’s useful. You’ve built it; now you have to get people to visit it.

In order for that to happen, there has to be an awareness that the site exists, and it has to be in the employee’s front of mind. By that, I mean it’s no good for the employee to be aware after prompting; it has to come to mind at the point of need.

Many organisations approach this by having a grand launch strategy. And there’s nothing much wrong with making a big splash when something new is launched, or even after a period of beta use. In many ways it’s a really good idea to use a mix of promotional strategies. However, a recurrent problem is that there’s no strategy beyond this.

For an initial promotional push, there are many channels you can take advantage of. Some examples might include:

• persuading your IT department to present a message on screensavers
• getting senior leaders to endorse the initiative, perhaps through video
• peer endorsement, by presenting the success stories of early testers
• distribute posters
• take advantage of any social media channels that your organisation may use
• stands in the foyer or canteen

But, a big launch on its own isn’t enough. Interest is ephemeral and tapers off. The truth is that a big fanfare is forgotten after a few days. And when the interest tapers off, what often happens is … a re-launch.

The real key to successful, long-term engagement in an online resource is regular, frequent communications to raise and maintain awareness.

All those other methods can still be used but there is a king, an emperor among all these channels, that has a dramatically more significant impact than all the others. All the major players in the online world are taking advantage of it. It’s not cool, it’s not sexy and it has a terrible reputation.

It’s email.

Now, when I talk to clients about this, one of the most common replies I hear is that employees already get too many emails and it simply isn’t feasible. There are strict limits put in place by internal comms or IT about the amount of internal email that gets generated. But to not use email means that you won’t leverage the single greatest communication mechanism of our time.

Personally, I believe there are better communication tools for many things, but I can’t go by what I think or believe. I go where the evidence takes me.

There is a reason that you get an email from Facebook every time someone wants to be your friend, or posts something about you.

There’s a reason why Twitter started to send you a weekly digest via email.

There’s a reason why Tesco and Amazon send you offers based on what you bought previously via email.

These companies have run massive studies and experiments to identify exactly the kind of approaches that result in more eyeballs coming to their services. These tactics drive up engagement. If they didn’t, they’d stop doing them. If everyone was genuinely too busy and overwhelmed, then they would have unsubscribed in their millions.

Having said that, you need to take an open, honest approach with email. I’ve got three recommendations for the use of emails to promote your online resource:

• While I’d advocate a system of automatic enrolment for your target employee base, it should be easy – really easy – to unsubscribe. It means that people in the organisation prone to complain can’t do so without seeming unreasonable – after all, it’s simply one email.
• Personalise the content as much as possible – people respond more to information about their own activity and that of people they can identify with.
• Automate it – there isn’t a guy at Amazon thoughtfully writing recommendation emails just for you. It doesn’t take a massive investment to generate a personalised email automatically if you’re working with the right tools.

To see the kind of emails that are successful, you need look no further than the major internet players who are already getting it right. I’ve collected some examples on a Pinterest board you can review. If you’ve got some examples you’d like to add, drop me a message and I’ll add you as a pinner.

Notice that all these emails are nicely branded, well designed and visually striking. They also work on both desktop email clients and on mobile. Simply sending out a bunch of text with blue links will not capture the attention of your employees. Once again, it’s worth investing a few hundred pounds on getting an email template that works.

So, there’s no need to avoid email. If it’s done right, you can ensure that your online initiative is front of mind for many more people who will then access it when they most need it. And if anyone asks them for support and the online resource would help, they’re more likely to steer them in that direction. Success breeds success.

That consistency of communication can be the difference between making a big splash without any long-term change, and a substantial, long-term increase in overall usage.

But a big question rears its ugly head at this point: how do you know whether this condition is where the problem lies? And the truth is it really depends on exactly what kind of resource you’re trying to raise awareness of. This kind of analysis can be a bit of a black art, but I’d like to share some examples that we’ve found to be useful in determining if we have to work harder to meet this first condition.

The most obvious one is the number of visits, or visitors, you get to your online resource in a given period, say a month, relative to the total size of your target user base. What success looks like will depend – you set your success criteria based on what the resource is – but to put it a simple way: if the number is going up, you’re doing something right. If it’s going down, you’re doing something wrong.

Similarly, if you aren’t reaching your desired numbers and all your visits are coming from people who have visited the resource before, you can be pretty certain that your awareness strategies aren’t working, but the resource is valued once someone visits it. This is why the number of return visits is worth tracking as a metric. Again, what success looks like will depend on the stage of the life cycle your resource is at, but even fairly old resources should still be getting new visitors on a regular basis.

When you carry out a new campaign, or send out a communication, you should expect to see a spike in visits. If you don’t, you can be fairly certain that something about your comms isn’t working – maybe people don’t read them, maybe the subject line wasn’t inviting enough, maybe the copy didn’t tell the user what’s in it for them. What you’re looking for after a campaign or communication is an increase from the average number of visits. This signal is a red flag; it doesn’t tell you what the answer is.

Finally, there’s visits to the launch pages. By this, I mean visits to the page where the employee accesses the online resource. I’m going to look into this in a bit more in the next post.

So, that’s the first condition. The employee must have the resource in their memory banks ready to spring to mind when they need it. But the next condition acknowledges that awareness itself is no good unless the employee knows how to get to the site and can access it easily. This is the second condition of online engagement and I’ll deal with that in the next post.

The post The First Condition of Online Engagement: Awareness appeared first on GoodPractice.

The ideas discussed in this post have come about after several years of working with clients to help them get the most out of their online learning resources. These could be performance support tools, learning portals or online networks.

Over time, we’ve developed and refined a simple model that outlines the conditions that must exist for employees to engage in an online resource. For each condition we’ve also identified some key signals that can inform you whether or not the condition is being met.

It’s a model that’s been tested, researched and refined. We’re an evidence-driven organisation, so we carry out a great deal of quantitative and qualitative research to establish what works in an online world. The main reason I can write down any of this with confidence is that we’ve experimented heavily, made some mistakes and learned from them.

Before looking at our model in any detail, there’s a critical pre-condition to discuss without which no clever initiatives or tactics will work.

The site/product/course must have clear, perceptible value to your target employee base.

This is important. It’s not just whether the resource has an actual benefit to the employee if they use it, although that’s also imperative. It’s whether they believe it’s useful themselves in advance of their moment of need.

And the only people who can judge this are the employees themselves – not the project group involved in designing, developing or commissioning the online resource.

So, how do we establish this? The easiest and best way we know of establishing whether or not an online proposition has value is through discussion, user testing and beta feedback. But you need to be checking and testing with the right group.

It’s no good testing an idea or concept with your peers in HR or the project group. You’re too close. You must test with your target end users.

A basic mistake often made is giving the target employees a look at what’s being developed towards the end stages of process rather than near the beginning. By this point changes are difficult and costly to make. Not only that, but the people responsible for the development have invested emotionally in what they’ve toiled on – they’re far less likely to take the employees’ comments on board constructively.

Believe me, it’s far better to show someone a basic wireframe with some wonky fonts right at the start and uncover critically flawed assumptions about content or usability than to create a finely polished resource that’s not right for the employee.

One interesting thing we’ve found over the years is how people think about learning vs doing their job. We carried out an extensive study a while back and a key finding was that employees, managers in particular, thought of learning as something they needed to make time for. It was seen as something that existed outside of their normal job.

Now, you can disagree with the sentiment, but the perception is there.

This explains why we’ve found that online resources labelled as ‘on-the-job support‘, rather than ‘learning’ get used more often. So this perceived value is also about positioning, and getting that right is as much about understanding your target employees as it is about getting the content right.

Given these pre-conditions, which are by no means easy to achieve, our model sets out four stages to successful engagement.

In broad terms, we talk about ‘to site’ engagement and ‘on site’ engagement.

‘To site’ engagement is all about making sure the conditions exist that get your employees visiting the resource in the first place. Simply sticking a blue link on a buried page on an intranet isn’t going to work. Neither is simply putting something up on a Learning Management System.

‘On site’ engagement is all about making sure that when the employee gets to the site, they have a positive experience that is more likely to encourage them to visit again. Once again, the core here is to ensure you have something that the employee values. If it’s just something that will benefit your organisation, without solving a problem for the employee, or making life easier for them, it’s not going to work long term.

Both ‘to-site’ engagement and ‘on-site’ engagement have two conditions for success.

In order for the employee to come to the online resource, they first need to be aware of it and think the resource will be of use to them. And then they need to know how they actually get to it.

In order for the employee to have a positive experience on the site, they need to quickly find something relevant to their needs and when they complete the course/read the article/watch the video, they need to come away thinking that was a worthwhile use of their time.

We recently interviewed 40 managers in a range of different organisations; a few of our clients and many non-clients. We asked these managers what their main people management challenges were and where they went to for support with those challenges. Overwhelmingly, the managers cited their peers and managers as points of contact. Many mentioned the internet, and Google searches in particular.

Only a tiny fraction mentioned internal resources. But when they were shown what was already available to them, they almost always said those resources would have been useful at the time.

It’s pretty clear from our research and our experience that the problem doesn’t always lie with the online resources themselves, but the general levels of awareness and ease of access.

For that reason, in the next two posts I’ll concentrate on those first two conditions. These are:

The First Condition of Online Engagement: Awareness

The Second Condition of Online Engagement: Access

The post A Simple Model for Online Engagement appeared first on GoodPractice.

The post How can leaders & managers live long and prosper on planet VUCA? appeared first on GoodPractice.

The presentation was a synthesis of three areas we have blogged on in the past, and here I want to link the ideas together in one place:

1. The context and framework through which we analyse the learning needs of managers. I believe we often have a natural but unhelpful bias that impacts on how we look at the evidence of managers’ learning needs.
2. Six techniques to undertake learning needs analysis.
3. The evidence of three years of search data by managers – what they are looking for?

Context and framework

In ‘Uncovering the learning habits of leaders and managers’ we set out the findings of our latest research on how managers learn. The key thing about this was how our research differed from other research into effectiveness and how this impacts on the context through which we consider the analysis of learning needs. If you ask L&D professionals ‘What are the most effective learning practices?’ the answer is, perhaps not surprisingly, ‘in-house development programmes’.

However, if you reframe the question and ask managers themselves the answers are much more weighted towards a strong preference for ‘informal’ learning methods, with support from peers, senior managers and internal experts cited particularly strongly.

So there would appear to be a natural in-built L&D bias towards in-house courses and, to be fair, the data from managers does say that they have a place, but they are certainly not the only answer and, for the majority of the leaders and managers, the preferred way of learning.

Reframing the question to one that is more focused on the performance outcome is also important. Ask yourself, ‘How do you like to learn?’ and then, ‘When were you last faced with an unfamiliar challenge, what did you do?’ Did you answer the questions differently? And if for the second question you said you Googled or asked a colleague, then that’s a very typical response.

Asking questions like this help to identify the real performance gap and, as Julie Dirksen sets out in in her wonderful book ‘Design for How People Learn’ (Jess wrote a series of blogs on the book when we covered it in our book club), it is the role of the L&D professional to establish if the performance gap is a:

1. knowledge gap
2. skills gap
3. motivation gap
4. environmental gap
5. communication gap

If it’s a knowledge gap you will be able to equip the manager with the information they require and they will be able to accomplish the task. It is a simple case of providing the right information, except of course it is seldom just the information that is needed. More often than not it is a skill that needs practice. Ask yourself if it is reasonable to think someone can only be proficient with practice, and if the answer is yes, then it is a skills gap and time and space for practice is required.

The other gaps are more to do with organisational issues and it may be that the performance gap doesn’t need a learning solution at all.

So I’m suggesting that before we try to understand the learning needs of managers we need to properly understand our own context for looking at the analysis and have a clear framework to understand the performance gap and whether a learning need exists.

Only once this context and framework is clearly in place can you properly explore the six techniques suggested for undertaking learning analysis.

In terms of the search data a new blog will follow soon with an update to ‘Needle in the Search Haystack: Identifying Managers’ Learning Needs’ but for the moment here is the Wordle for the search terms for 2013.

Wordle of managers search terms 2012.

Finally, the real skill of the L&D professional is in their ability to interpret the data and this takes skill and the use of a number of the techniques suggested. As an example of how this can differ, the data for the Wordle suggests ‘difficult conversations’ is fairly far down our list of importance (it’s at number 20) but in the survey of learning needs, ‘having difficult conversations’ was listed by managers as the number one challenge.

So the analysis is not a strict science, but there is a lot of evidence there to help you understand the performance gap and learning needs of leaders and managers; you just need to be thoughtful about how you find the evidence and apply it.

The post Analysing and identifying the learning needs of your managers appeared first on GoodPractice.

Conducted live at Good Practice’s stand 88 and throughout the show, “Learning Trends Live” gathered first insights from Learning Technologies’ show visitors and delivered the freshest thinking available at #lt13uk .

Here’s the full blogroll generated over the two days of the show

Course design in multi-channel eLearning environments “much more complex” for 13% of LT13UK visitors today

Mobile learning unlikely or off the agenda completely for over 65% of today #LT13UK visitors

Nearly half (46%) of today’s #LT13UK visitors believe economic pressures will result in “significant” social learning boost

Top 3 drivers #LT13UK visitors say will impact L&D department over next 6 months

Learning Technologies visitors 5x more optimistic than the average L&D expert

Economic worries “very significant” for 7/10 #LT13UK visitors

Want the bigger picture?

Learning Trends 6 compiles the thoughts, insights, expectations and reservations of over 300 leaders and managers. Sign up for the GoodPractice Toolkit and be one of the first to preview the new study.

The post Learning Trends Live – blogroll appeared first on GoodPractice.

Almost 75% of respondents confirmed that these multiple devices had made their jobs at least slightly more difficult, and 12.9% stated that it had made their course creation ‘much more complex’.

The stats

When asked “Today’s learning needs to be available on desktop, iPad, tablet and smart-phone. How much more complex does this make course design and delivery for you?” participants answered:

Much more complex – 12.9%
Moderately more complex – 32.26%
Slightly more complex – 29.03%
No more complex – 16.13%
We don’t deliver learning through all of these platforms – 9.68%

Our previous survey question revealed that 65% of attendees are unlikely to pilot a mobile learning scheme over the next 6 months – and it’s possible that these perceived complexities could be the cause!

Want the bigger picture?

This is our final question of the #LTUK13 exhibition this year, so we want to thank you to everyone that took part and came to see us at stand 88! If you’ve missed out and want to share your thoughts, why not complete our ongoing Learning Trends 6 survey?

Learning Trends 6 compiles the thoughts, insights, expectations and reservations of over 300 leaders and managers. Once you’ve filled it out, sign up for the GoodPractice Toolkit and be one of the first to preview the new study.

The post Course design in multi-channel eLearning environments “much more complex” for 13% of LT13UK visitors appeared first on GoodPractice.

The majority of L&D professionals attending #LT13UK today are still cautious about adding new mobile options to their arsenal of resources, Good Practice’s Learning Trends Live survey has revealed. The participants were interviewed during the second afternoon of the Learning Technologies exhibition, currently occurring in London’s Olympia 2, but despite the inspiring nature of mobile products on show, 43% said that they were unlikely to launch a new mobile learning option and 23% said they definitely would not.

The breakdown

When asked “How likely are you to launch or pilot a new mobile learning option within the next 6 months?” respondents answered:

Very likely – 13.64%
Quite likely – 20.45%
Not very likely – 43.18%
Definitely not – 22.73%

Next

Today’s learning needs to be available on desktop, iPad, tablet and smart-phone. How much more complex does this make course design and delivery for you? Take part.

We’ll be asking more of these questions throughout the exhibition, so for more of this up to the minute news, follow us on twitter @goodpractice or visit us at stand 88 today.

Want the bigger picture?

Learning Trends 6 compiles the thoughts, insights, expectations and reservations of over 300 leaders and managers. Sign up for the GoodPractice Toolkit and be one of the first to preview the new study.

The post Mobile learning unlikely or off the agenda completely for over 65% of today’s #LT13UK visitors appeared first on GoodPractice.

The numbers

When asked “What impact do you think the economy will have on your reliance on informal learning six months from now?” respondents answered:

Very significant impact – 18.03%
Significant impact – 27.87%
Some impact – 31.15%
Low impact – 18.03%
No impact – 4.92%

Interestingly, the results reflect the current findings from Good Practice’s ongoing Learning Trends 6 survey, which has been completed outside of the context of the exhibition and shown that more than 90% of L&D professionals believe that that the economy will have at least some impact on the way that they approach informal learning.

Next

How likely are you to launch or pilot a new mobile learning option within the next 6 months? Take part.

We’ll be asking more of these questions throughout the exhibition, so for more of this up to the minute news, follow us on twitter @goodpractice or visit us at stand 88 today.

Want the bigger picture?

Learning Trends 6 compiles the thoughts, insights, expectations and reservations of over 300 leaders and managers. Sign up for the GoodPractice Toolkit and be one of the first to preview the new study.

The post Nearly half (46%) of today’s #LT13UK visitors believe economic pressures will result in “significant” social learning boost appeared first on GoodPractice.

L&D experts attending the #LT13UK exhibition today were shown to be highly optimistic about the business drivers most likely to have an impact on their department over the next twelve months, Good Practice’s Learning Trends Live survey has revealed.

When visitors at #LT13UK were asked “What is the top key business driver most likely to impact on your learning department in the next six months?”, the top three answers were:

1. Improving organisational execution and efficiency (21.88%)
2. Improving employee engagement and commitment (15.63%)
3. Technology innovation (14.06%)

The figures

These highly positive drivers came out ahead of other options like “cost reduction and containment (10.94%)” and “falling market share (3.13%)”, in spite of current economic pressures recognised across the industry.

Next: How likely are you to launch or pilot a new mobile learning option within the next 6 months? Take part 

We’ll be asking more of these questions throughout the exhibition, so for more of this up to the minute news, follow us on twitter @goodpractice or visit us at stand 88 today.

Want the bigger picture?

Learning Trends 6 compiles the thoughts, insights, expectations and reservations of over 300 leaders and managers. Sign up for the GoodPractice Toolkit and be one of the first to preview the new study.

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