@Work – The Employee Engagement Feature you Didn’t Know You Needed
Not long ago, our clients brought us a puzzler: how to limit access to training content without limiting access to cultural content. We crafted a nifty solution called @Work.
By Jason Bacaj | 4 min read
Most learners have a smartphone within reach at all times. They’re already used to grabbing it when they need information on the go. And that constant contact makes your Learning Management System (LMS) all the more engaging and useful, right?
Well, it’s not all sunshine and daisies. New technologies mean new challenges with online training management. Hourly employees have access to training 24/7. What happens when they pull up your LMS off the clock? Do you know whether your state, like California, has labor laws with training regulations that require you to pay hourly employees for training completed outside of work?
Our clients with hourly and part-time employees gave us this puzzler not all that long ago: they wanted users to have access to cultural content whenever they wanted, but worried about having to track time spent on training and how to properly compensate people for their professional development efforts… let’s just say that sent us down a rabbit hole of research-heavy hypotheticals.
One potential quick fix is to only give learners access to the LMS while at work. That makes intuitive sense, but quick fixes almost always have unexpected effects on big-picture strategy. For instance, driving engagement becomes a bit more complicated when learners have limited access.
So, we took that quick fix idea and crafted it into a solution that allows you to keep certain content available only at work while granting all learners full access to the system’s social and communication features. We call it @Work.
The solution, it turned out, was relatively simple. Just like you can assign specific content to specific learners, with @Work you can assign content to a specific physical location.
Employees can only access training content while at work
Interaction with the System
It’s important that learners have access to cultural content, communication, and social features on your LMS. Their interactions with the system help keep them intellectually and emotionally invested in company culture—the sort of connection that continues even after they’ve clocked out for the day.
Unlimited access to cultural and personal development content is a great way to foster that connection. Curating Ted Talks, book recommendations, or podcasts can help you engage and retain millennial employees. Research shows that millennials—the largest segment of the workforce—want to work for organizations that offer opportunities for development and growth.
Let’s say you’re with a restaurant and need to boost engagement among part-time workers. You could pair a seasonal promotions course with a user video upload contest where part-timers compete for concert tickets or gift cards. One of our clients—an industry-leading juicery—does just that each month. And it works: their level of engagement is in the top 10 of all Wisetail clients and top five among restaurants.
The key to successful learner outreach is constant access to your LMS. And with @Work, you can do just that worry free.
Having worked our way through this process, we’ve obviously solved the hypothetical dilemma with a dynamic solution, and delivered it with much panache and derring-do. As you go on to apply this thought process to your own real-world problems, keep the sage words of David Kelley, founder of Stanford University’s design school, in mind: you have to fail fast if you want to succeed sooner.
