From everything we read these days in the learning and development (L&D) field, we know that the actions of the modern workplace are changing. Development is increasingly treated to be as important if not more important than compensation. With the rapid pace of change in team size and structure and in workplace methods, learning needs to be adaptable and efficient. A microlearning strategy can be vital for your organization’s success. Microlearning is not a new concept; it is a natural expansion of the way we all soak up new information every day. We are always learning, step by step, day by day.
Those long training sessions are not appropriate to empower most employees or to help them retain information. Microlearning is a single concept which should focus on an individual idea to influence employee goals and behavior. It is multimodal and should use varied media, including video, high-impact design, auditory bits, working tools and quizzes. It should take place in the regular workflow of the learner, so it is more appropriate and applicable right away.
In today’s ambitious talent economy, organizations need solutions that will arouse impact and promote curiosity and engagement. A microlearning strategy is the incentive, companies need to develop their employees as people, not just as contributors to the company. It’s built to extend connections between learning initiatives and business priorities.
Steps for Success
Through three simple steps, your company can aim critical skill sets and mindsets that employees require to be successful and consequently, create a more efficient workforce.
- Start Small – Think about one crucial shortcoming that’s been a stress on your team’s communication and functionality. There are probably lots of behaviors you could name that damage your company’s goals. Focus on a specific set of employee behaviors that will finally assist your company’s business goals. They are where you can create your strategy. Begin with your first problem statement, and continue to ask why to go beyond the working level. The constant questioning will lead you to the root cause of the uncertain behavior you’re trying to solve.
- Stay Focused – Many microlearning strategies fail because their scope is too large. Recognize competing priorities from the start: What has the capacity to distract attention from your strategy? Spreading your goals in an unattractive way, can weaken your impact later. Repeating why the training is the way it is and knowing what competing solutions could take shape will help your team and leaders stay focused.
- Make It Stick – Building a strategy is one thing and successfully utilizing it, is another. Skills that employees immediately apply to a real work situation have a better chance at sticking. The behavior you’re trying to alter or the skills you’re trying to build through this microlearning strategy will be more successful if employees can instantly transfer the learning.
Encouraging a culture of continuous learning at your organization is a key component of your microlearning strategy as well. The training programs should be communicated properly, and managers need to understand what follow-ups are expected of them. Employees expect to receive meaningful learning opportunities and the ones who feel their growth is a priority are engaged and are more likely to stay at a company.
With these elements as a base you can consider how you might employ a microlearning strategy to accomplish your unique business goals. For example, a major hack for your business is empowering individual contributors to influence and lead teams without authority. Resist the urge to over- build, and start small. Build a program that highlights the individual concepts that are associated with the task. Suddenly, microlearning emerges from a type of content to a powerful organizational strategy.
There will always be a place for instructor-led training, blended learning and peer learning. But a microlearning strategy is exceptionally effective in empowering the L&D practitioner with a flexible and agile approach to help employees thrive in the modern workplace