Digital performance support: The burning issue
Pascal Guderian
Digitization is changing many things—both in our private and working lives. There is an increasing number of applications and digital workflows to understand and master. Conventional training and qualification courses will struggle to keep up.
With this in mind, it is worth revisiting the topic of performance support. Employees of all ages now expect this kind of support from their company—anytime, anywhere.
This expectation is a reflection of a world in which the entire knowledge of humanity is available to everyone at the click of a mouse, which makes it difficult to explain why some companies cannot quickly and easily share their internal knowledge with employees. Nevertheless, to implement effective performance support, important aspects have to be considered. This applies to many different tasks, such as new software rollouts or everyday use of software-supported processes.
The objectives of digital performance support today
The little hurdles of daily working life consume a considerable amount of employees’ time. Multiple days of face-to-face training cannot be the solution. The consensus among experts is that knowledge learned in formal settings is usually forgotten quickly. Learning directly in the workplace, while employees are doing their jobs, is much more effective. That’s exactly where performance support comes into play, with software that is seamlessly integrated into the employees’ workflow. Ideally, it should provide resources for individual needs in a variety of learning situations—exactly in the moment of need.
Employees access content that is tailored to their role and linked to all their applications. Support is right at your fingertips: Field help, work instructions, process information, and training courses are built into the performance software. But modern performance support has even more to offer. It is not just an archive; it is an assistant. Intelligent guides lead the user through all IT applications. This makes every task a piece of cake, while improving data quality.
The latest generation of performance support leverages the full potential of digital technologies. Intelligent guides help the user navigate through applications, and employees share their knowledge with colleagues.
Tap into the knowledge of your users
Taking all of this into consideration, performance support can no longer be a one-way street. The right software enables users to be active and share their knowledge with colleagues or create guides by themselves. It’s easy to create and publish your own content. This makes the expertise of specialists in specific topics accessible to all colleagues, forming the ideal basis for a culture of knowledge sharing.
Companies see the benefits of good performance support right from day one. Users work much more productively and avoid process errors without being torn away from their workflow. That not only helps with pressing issues, but also improves the ability to work with processes and act in the long term. Help desk staff will be glad of the considerable relief, and less time and money is required for training. It’s difficult to think of a simpler and more cost-effective way to prepare employees for the most critical challenge of our time: digitization.
