Remote working has suddenly become a way of life for most of us. This presents a great opportunity for L&D teams to boost your company’s knowledge base. The key is to leverage your company’s greatest asset: its people and their expertise.
You’ve probably witnessed that remote working prevents your company’s employees from reaching 100% of their normal workloads. Thanks to modern technologies, we can perform many of our tasks from home. But some projects and tasks may be put on hold now until we’re able to return to business as usual. That means your employees may have some extra time on their hands.
Use this “downtime” as a chance to expand your company’s knowledge base. Here’s how to do it.
Easygenerator has pioneered a content-authoring method called Employee-Generated Learning (EGL). Under this model, L&D singles out experts on specific topics within the organization. These “subject-matter experts” (SMEs) are a goldmine of useful, real-life experience and information.
Give these employees access to easy-to-use content-authoring software like Easygenerator. Ask them to create content, such as step-by-step guides, tutorials, and quick tips that they can share with their team members online.
Speed up the circulation of knowledge in your organization by enabling employees to create content themselves.
To make EGL work, you need a zero-learning curve online learning tool, like Easygenerator. The key is to offer a minimalist, user-friendly interface that SMEs can use to author learning content without having to go through extensive training first.
As an L&D professional, it will be your job to guide the content creation process under an EGL model. Identify the areas where your knowledge base is lacking information or needs brushing up. Talk with employees or use easy online survey tools (like SurveyMonkey) to gauge the topics that your learners want to know more about.
Talk with managers and find out which employees are the leading experts on the training topics you want to scale up. Then, schedule some facetime with these SMEs (using Zoom, for example) and discuss your learning goals. Coach them on how to create concise learning content that will add value to your organization’s knowledge base.
Introduce your SMEs to the online learning tool you’ve chosen. Let them start creating and publishing content. As an L&D professional, it’s your job to monitor their training output and intervene to improve when necessary. Just make sure that your SMEs feel a sense of ownership over their content. This will encourage them to produce more and more.
Use a simple content evaluation metric like net promoter score (NPS) to rate the usefulness of the content your SMEs produce. NPS is a good choice. It makes it quick and easy for learners to rate the training content when they’re finished viewing it. This helps you spot what content learners find useful, and improve content that they find less useful.
With the EGL model, your company can optimize precious working hours as most of its employees work from home. It’s a great option for turning our current crisis into an opportunity for expanding knowledge. Best of all, the benefits of EGL will be just as powerful even after we return to business as usual.
