Tag Archives: training employees

Corporate Learning and Development, e-Learning, Employee-Training, Mobile Learning, Online Learning, sales enablement

Here are the best methods for Employee Performance Evaluation

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Looking for the best evaluation methods to rate and scale your employees? Well, here are a few best methods for employee performance evaluation.

Do your employees give their best performance? Do they meet the deadlines and excel in everything assigned to them? But with all this, are they really climbing up the success ladder?

To find your answers to the above questions, you need data analysis to evaluate their performance. You need a clear framework to collect, select, and interpret data on your employees. Performance evaluation methods can differ based on companies and their needs. You may even need a mix of two or three methods to have a better understanding of the employee. Dive right in and find out the best techniques to review employee performance. 

Methods of Employee Performance Evaluation

There are three critical elements for evaluation:

  • The work one does: both qualitative and quantitative
  • The time taken
  • The actual contribution of the employee

Evaluation includes strengths, weaknesses, talents, skills, qualitative and quantitative data. 

The company can come up with the best training methods based on the results. Quodeck is your destination for evaluation aid. Here are some methods you can implement:

Management by objective (MBO)

The company sets particular objectives for all the employees. At the end of the deadline, the outcomes can assess the employee’s performance. The management tracks every employee’s progress and corrects it at any point.

MBO cannot be very precise as external factors are not considered. This can backfire on the employees’ outcomes and eventually get a low grade on the scorecard. A sales quota is the best example of MBO.

Critical incident method

The critical incident method is quite famous in customer-service-oriented jobs. This method allows managers to get overall feedback on an employee from other employees, customers, and higher management. The feedback gives a clear picture of how the employee handled a crisis and issue during their service.

This method encourages managers to observe certain events to judge the employee’s reaction. It can be positive or negative and also give clear input on their situational skills. The feedback also aids the company in coming up with better methods of training for the employees.

Rating scale

Many organizations use this method. The list or the questionnaire contains specific questions based on behaviors, traits, skills, or others. The employees are made to rate on a scale of 5 or 10. This method can be biased as employees favor each other most of the time.

Either way, the rating scale helps to monitor all the employees on the same categories and elements. This method is also efficient when employees have to rate new implementations or employer’s practices. The rating can also be Likert scales.

Continuous feedback

Feedback is an ongoing process of growing. A company needs to take continuous feedback to establish new methods, rules, and better targets. It is designed to take place at regular intervals where employees get to write and give feedback on their team members and managers on their teams. It is a two-way process that helps everyone to grow together.

Continuous feedback helps allow managers or team members to take charge whenever one needs help or is underperforming. This intervention will help prevent the situation from going out of hand. This method assists the company in grooming its employees according to their needs.

360-degree feedback

360-degree feedback appraisal method provides a chance for all the employees to give their opinions and feedback. Here,  every employee gets a rating from their colleagues, superiors, peers, customers, and management. The employee is evaluated from all sides: 360-degree feedback.

Under this system, a questionnaire is created by the HR department. It contains questions on all aspects. It can be teamwork, adaptability, leadership qualities, goal orientation, motivation levels, and strengths. Relevant people are made to fill the questionnaire anonymously. The feedback helps the employee to grow. It gives a clear insight into how others perceive them and their work.

Self-evaluation

Self-evaluation is a vital process for both employee and company growth. This method offers an opportunity for employees to play an active role in their evaluation process. It helps establish better communication between the staff and management. The employees can test their strengths, weaknesses and abilities, and skills and work on them.

Conclusion

Employee performance evaluation is vital. It helps both the company and employees to grow together. They give a clear insight on how well the staff is working and where they are lacking. Performance evaluation also helps to recognize talents and provide appraisals.

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Corporate Learning and Development, e-Learning, Employee-Training, Learning Management System, Micro-learning, Mobile Learning, Online Learning, QuoDeck

7 Tips for Employee Learning and Development: Expert Tips on How to Train Your Employees

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What do you need to run a successful business? You can be anyone, from an entrepreneur to an influencer. But whenever you are online, you need something to grab attention. Of course, your content does that for you. But is that all? Can’t you just do better than now? Yes, we all can. 

The main goal of any online business is to keep your audience active. It ensures their coming back to your platform and making some purchase. But, it is a job better said than done. So, are you looking for a tool that allows you to stay active with your audience? Look no more. Here is the list of must-have tools for any online business. 

Tools To Help You Better Your Online Presence

  1. Social Media Tools

Social media presence is now the most important thing for any individual or brand. To make it clear, here is a statistic that highlights the importance of social media presence for brands. 71% of people who have had a good experience with a brand on social media are more likely to recommend that brand to their friends and families. 

And how do you improve this social media presence? Well, being active on your accounts does not always help. Of course, you can go from one platform to another and check each engagement differently. 

Or, you can simply use social media tools for better engagement. Tools like Hootsuite, Talkwalker, and Google Alerts are some social media analytics and monitoring platforms to name. 

These platforms get to observe everything happening on social media related to your brand. For example, you will get to see all the comments on your different platforms in one place. It helps in replying and connecting with your audience easily. 

And faster connection means a better experience. Using social media tools is way more effective and allows you to stay engaged with your audience. 

  1. Content Discovery Tools

You have to keep up with your competitors as well. Otherwise, you will see your audience going away to them. So, good competitor research is always important. But is it always possible to keep track of all your competitors manually? Most of the time, no. 

So, the easiest way is to run a competitor research tool. These tools run a quick research on the given keywords and find you all related content on the web. You can use Buzzsumo for that purpose. This tool is a must-have for anyone running online content for their business. 

  1. Marketing Automation Tool

Marketing is a crucial thing to engage with your audience. However, digital marketing is more than that. You need to take care of a lot of things- from your customer’s journey to their reactions. So, a content marketing tool can be the most helpful in this case. 

As a content marketing automation tool, you can consider using Hubspot. Hubspot lets you keep track of your marketing journey and helps you target your audience. Targeting is crucial and when you pass the stage, engaging with your audience becomes easier!

  1. Live Chat Software

Have you noticed those pop-up messages you get when you visit certain websites? These are live chat support or chatbots. These chatbots are very much helpful in increasing your audience engagement. So, how do these work? 

For live chat software, you can use ProProfs Chat. When someone has visited your blog or website, this chatbot keeps track of that. Now, after a certain time, if the person does not take any action on your site, a voice or chat pops up to grab their attention. By doing that, your audience feels like there is someone to help.

  1. Interactive Content Tool

Interactive content is the future of content marketing. While an average blog post takes around 3.5 hours to complete, interactive content is easy to design and more engaging. In addition, people here get to interact, which increases the ROI. So, modern marketers focus more on interactive content.

Amplayfy is an interactive content creator tool. Here you can create a variety of content, from quizzes to polls and surveys within minutes. These help you keep your audience engaged and increase the conversion rate. Interactive content is also helpful for influencer marketing. So make sure you try it out as soon as possible. 

Conclusion

Engaging your audience with your content is a very crucial thing to boost your online growth. And if you are serious about your online presence, you get to know every possible way to crack that. These are the best tools that you can use to stay active with your audience. We hope this discussion was helpful. We will see you with the next topic right here!

Corporate Learning Best Practices, eLearning Develpment Best Practices, Employee-Training, Mobile Learning, On-boarding/ Induction, Online Learning, QuoDeck

5 Major Challenges With On-boarding During Pandemic

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The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the working pattern all over the globe. With social distancing and lockdowns in place, a large number of organisations transitioned to telecommuting with some even increasing their hiring to meet the expanding business demands. This greatly affected their onboarding process, making the training and induction modalities rather complicated. 

Integrating new employees into the company isn’t easy. And when one is largely functioning on remote working, it makes it even more challenging.

Let us look at the 5 major challenges with the onboarding process during the pandemic-

1) Inability to personalise the process-

Induction helps in integrating a new employee into the company’s culture while instructing them about their own roles and responsibilities within the organisation’s structure and functioning. It facilitates in establishing personal connections and a great working relationship among colleagues. 

However, in the absence of a face-to-face interaction, it becomes difficult to personalise the onboarding process. Instead of meeting the team and getting to know them in an informal and relaxed setting, the new employees would have to contend with a video call or even in some cases, an email message. This proves challenging in building a strong lasting working relationship among peers. 

2) Ineffective Communication-

Effective onboarding is crucial for employee engagement, retention and for boosting the overall productivity of the organisation. With telecommuting, it may not be possible at times to know everyone in the team and the new employees may get confused about whom to approach for clarifying or obtaining certain information. They may also be unaware about the hierarchy within the organisation or may feel reluctant to ask questions.

On-site Induction allows the new members to get to know their colleagues and establish a cordial relation with them, which allows them to approach their peers for help or clarification regarding a particular situation. In the absence of this relationship, the employees may hesitate to reach out to others which leads to communication gaps.

Also, without facial expression, gestures or tone of a person’s voice as a guide, it is often easy to misinterpret a message as critical or curt when it comes through the email. This, further hampers effective communication, which in turn greatly affects the overall productivity of the organisation. 

3) Ineffective employee engagement-

Onboarding is crucial as it introduces the new employee to the company’s business culture and value systems. They also understand the code of conduct essential to every member and learn to build a good working rapport with their colleagues, other senior managers and the organisation’s leaders. 

This may be very difficult to communicate through a virtual induction program and may result in many employees feeling unwelcome or unable to identify and integrate themselves with the company’s culture. This greatly affects their participation and engagement with the organisation and leads to lower employee retention.

4) Inability to monitor employee performance-

Monitoring the employee’s performance and progress is an important step in integrating them into the company’s work ethics and culture. Feedback is important as it clarifies assumptions and expectations, helps people improve and learn from their mistakes and builds confidence. Constructive feedback also helps in reinforcing positive behaviour and generating a strong work culture. It is therefore essential that the new employee’s progress be monitored and reviewed. 

This however, becomes challenging in a remote working scenario. Not only is there a disadvantage of physical distance, but even the process for documenting and monitoring the employees’ performance may be unclear or not adequately defined. As a result, they may underperform or fail to achieve the targeted milestone. This would not only affect the individual’s growth but also the company’s progress at large.

5) Unavailability of essential equipment-

Digitization of modern business has made it impossible to function well without appropriate technology. Most new employees are provided with their own laptop and other essential software, tools and programs that are necessary for their work. This particularly becomes challenging during the pandemic, especially if the employee has to be trained to use a particular software or program. Some organisations may also find it difficult to reevaluate their employment benefit schemes to make it relevant to the current situation.

These are the 5 major challenges with onboarding during the pandemic. They can however, be overcome by making the necessary changes to the Induction program and leveraging mobile technology to make the process more engaging, interactive and effective. 

Corporate Learning and Development, Corporate Learning Best Practices, e-Learning, eLearning Develpment Best Practices, Employee-Training, L&D professionals, QuoDeck

How To Choose The Right Kind Of Video For Your Employee Training

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Video-based learning has become an important part of corporate training delivery today. In this article, I share pointers that will help you identify what training videos would work best for your employees.

Choosing The Right Kind Of Video For Your Employee Training

Using videos for training employees has been around for a while. Of late, there is an acceleration in their usage. This is on account of the wider adoption of mobile learning and microlearning as they both leverage extensively on video-based learning.

Video is an immensely high-impact medium and when used as training videos for employees, they offer:

  • High engagement quotient
  • Sticky learning experience leading to higher retention and recall

The value of using training videos for employees lies in their ability to offer:

  • Formal training which can be consumed “on the go”
  • Instant job aids that are within the learners’ workflow and can be accessed at the moment of their need
  • Informal learning
  • Social learning

How Can You Use Training Videos For Your Employees?

You can use training videos for employees to supplement your corporate trainings and step up their impact. Some of the key trainings that can leverage on videos for employee training include:

  1. Induction and onboarding
  2. Soft skills training
  3. Product training
  4. Sales training
  5. Application simulations training
  6. Compliance training

The flexibility of training videos enables you to use them for:

  1. Formal training (online)
  2. Support Instructor-Led Training (ILT) or Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT)
  3. Performance Support (learning aids/job aids to support formal training)
  4. Social learning

This is not all. The true power of videos for employee training lies in their ability to contribute beyond learning or performance support intervention. They can contribute to other levels of the learning and performance ecosystem, notably to:

  1. Create a buzz or awareness (before the launch of the training program)
  2. Support crucial change management initiatives
  3. Continue the connect with the learners (post the training program)

Are There Any Drawbacks Or Limitations That You Should Be Aware Of As You Opt For Training Videos For Employees?

As I see it, there are a couple of aspects that you should note:

From The Development-And-Cost Perspective

The cost of video-based learning for formal training or as Performance Support is higher as compared to traditional eLearning development. You also need to be aware that any updates or enhancements do entail significant costs and lead time.

From The Learning-Impact Perspective

Even though video-based learning offers an immersive learning experience, the video does have an intrinsic limitation of “passivity”. It allows learners only to start/stop or pause.

This can impede the learning impact when you have long run length videos.

Additionally, you cannot track the learners’ progress as they go through videos for training.

What Kind Of Video Formats Can You Opt For In Order To Create Training Videos For Your Employees?

You have wide-ranging options that you can offer as training videos for your employees:

  1. Teaser videos
  2. Context-setting videos
  3. Explainer videos
  4. Scenario-based videos
  5. Story-based videos
  6. Complex decision-making branching simulation based videos

Are There Other Interesting Approaches That Can Enhance The Impact Of Training Videos For Employee Training?

Here are 3 interesting options that you should certainly consider:

1. Interactive videos
This is a Next Gen approach that creates highly interactive and immersive video-based learning solutions. It includes:

  • Learning interactions that are similar to traditional eLearning (Hot spots, Click and Reveal and so on)
  • Quizzes and assessments
  • Learning paths that branch to different tracks based on learners’ choices
  • Gamification elements
  • Unlike traditional videos, interactive videos allow you to track learner performance, and they also offer SCORM output

2. Microlearning videos
These short, focused, bite-sized videos use rapid development approaches. They are particularly useful as a social learning tool. They are designed to be available within the learners’ workflow so that they can access the relevant bite exactly at the time of their need.

3. 360-degree videos for VR and AR
These can take your user engagement and stickiness of learning to an all high level.

What Kind Of Training Videos Would Resonate With Your Employees?

Modern learners face challenges of distractions and multi-tasking, and they certainly do not want to carve out a block of time for training. They want the training to be flexible, short, focused, and available on the go. So, as you opt for videos for your employee training, match it with their lifestyle and accordingly, craft the learning journey.

Here is a list of my top 5 strategies you should adopt as you offer training videos for your employees:

  1. Create the buzz or awareness and establish WIIFM (What Is In It For Me)
  2. Set context or teach concepts
  3. Offer learning followed by practice, application, and summaries
  4. Checkpoint learners’ progress and understanding
  5. Reinforce and keep the “Forgetting Curve” at bay

What Would Be The Impact Of Using Training Videos For Your Employees?

You would see:

  • Higher engagement
  • Better completion rates
  • Better retention and recall
  • Better performance support leading to better application of the acquired learning
  • Increased focus on informal learning
  • Higher ROI on your training spend

I hope this article gives you great ideas that you can use as you implement training videos for your employee training. If you have any specific queries, do contact me or leave a comment below.

By Asha Pandey, Chief Learning Strategist at EI Design

e-Learning, Game-based learning, Learning Management System, Mobile Learning, Serious Games, Start-up's

How to use games to market your learning program?

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One of the major challenges HR and L&D professionals face is getting the employees to get interested in the learning programs. Games or rather game-based learning can help here. This article will focus on how a company can market its so-called boring learning programs and make them interesting.

Using Games To Market Your Learning Program

Getting your employees interested in your learning program is a herculean task. You won’t find a lot of people coming up to you and asking about your next eLearning course. Why should anyone? It’s not the next iPhone. Or the next Avengers movie.

So, the solution here is not just creating the most engaging course ever, but also making it sound like it is as interesting as the next iPhone or the next Avengers movie.

Now imagine these 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1: You’re standing in a meeting room and you say this—Raise your hands if you want to go through my next eLearning course!

Scenario 2: You’re standing in a meeting room and you say this—Raise your hands if you want to play my next learning game!

Which announcement would generate more curiosity? A game would definitely have the upper hand. As a planet, we play 3 billion hours of games every week. Why not use this to transform your training program into the next iPhone!

Games As A Medium For Marketing

Games have been used for marketing for years now. Go to the Play Store and search for ‘Justice League games’ and you will know what I am talking about. Games are exciting, competitive, and provide an immersive experience.

The first thing you should do is move to game-based learning. Stop thinking about your course in terms of a presentation with images and tabs. Think of it as a game, where the learner must find the hidden treasure or kill the demon, and the learning content will help him achieve this objective. Add a storyline and let the assessments appear in the form of learning games. Now you have an engaging and exciting game-based learning course ready. Is that all? Target achieved? Not at all. This is just the beginning.

Think Like A Marketer

Stop thinking about your course as a learning manager and start thinking like a marketer. You’re no longer marketing a course, but an exciting game. Get your marketing department involved as well. How would you go about it? Plan your marketing campaigns in 2 phases:

Phase I – Pre-Launch Campaigns

Teaser Campaigns

Start with a teaser campaign with catchy copy, like ‘The Lost Treasure. Coming soon!’. Send out emailers or put out posters with cryptic messaging. Plan this for a week or two before your course launch and start attracting eyeballs. Make sure you use game-related visuals or theme to put this out. They have to connect back to your game so your audience can relate to it when you reveal your course.

Trailer Videos

Have you seen these short videos featuring the characters from the popular game—Clash of Clans? Here’s one of them. These entertain you and generate curiosity about the game. Create short videos like this and share with your employees. These will help you with the much-needed virality. You don’t have to create rich animated videos like this, but you can create simple ones. There are a lot of tools out there which can help you get these created or one of your training partners can help you with this.

Quiz Contest Using Learning Game

A lot of products offer samples to provide a first-hand experience to the customers. It is one of the most effective strategies. Create a quick learning game which you have used in your course and plan out a quiz contest using the same. Reward the top players with vouchers or certificates to encourage word-of-mouth publicity. Plan this as a trailer and inform your players to watch out for the larger game.

Phase II – Post-Launch Campaigns

Leaderboards And Rewards

Once your learners start playing your course, monitor it, and look out for the early adopters. These are the first ones to access your course. Reward them for this feat. Do create a leaderboard featuring the top 5 or 10 players. Share this within the organization to recognize the top players.

Giveaways

Have you ever bought a happy meal from McDonald’s? Remember the free toy which you got? It is one of the major reasons why people buy a happy meal. Giveaways have a huge recall value and do encourage virality. See if you could plan for a small giveaway, like a keychain or coaster which features one of the characters from the game.

Remember, just because you have put a lot of effort to create the best eLearning course, does not mean others would be interested in it as well. You have to communicate it in a way which your audience would find it interesting. So, put your marketing hat on and get started!

By Deepak Gawas, Head- Partnerships at QuoDeck

(This article was initially published on elearningindustry.com)

Employee-Training, L&D professionals, QuoDeck, Sales

Why engagement is a critical ingredient in successful sales training?

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Building a performing sales team is the holy grail that all organizations chase – and it’s definitely not an easy task. But building lasting engagement is a critical ingredient that can separate a good sales training program from a bad one.

Sales is the lifeblood of most organizations, and a performing sales team is worth its weight in gold.

Building an effective sales training program is the holy grail that all sales trainers chase – and it’s definitely not an easy task. More often than not, what seems like an easy problem to solve, can be a multi-layered challenge within a changing business and technology environment.

It’s clear that there are no easy formulas that sales trainers can plug in to make their sales training programs effective. But it all starts with ensuring that sales people at least consume the learning. Without adoption, it is futile to worry about downstream metrics like effectiveness, retention and application.

Adoption has many layers, and is very similar to any modern marketing problem. If you think of learners as consumers or ‘app users’ in the modern mobile learning context, problems become a little more apparent.

Just like a consumer app faces uninstalls after an initial period of usage, most learning programs suffer because they focus on creating short-term engagement. A good onboarding course or a gamified learning program will create short-term engagement but will leave learners very little to come back to when they have finished consuming that piece of content.

Therefore, sales trainers typically see good initial usage of their programs, and very little engagement after that.

In a training context, even if this results in a good onboarding experience, it rarely results in ongoing consumption of sales training and communication, Therefore, after the initial onboarding program, when sales people are on the field and need to be trained on new product releases or to address problem areas, getting them back to the training app or platform is as big a problem as when you launch.

So, how can you keep them coming back again and again? Build engagement.

It may help to better understand the psyche of the modern learner to figure out how to create ongoing engagement. In the context of mobile learning, any training app is competing for mindshare with platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. These are the apps that your users prefer to spend time on rather than consume learning. What is attractive about these apps, is that they serve up a constant stream of content for users to consume.

Learners will only flock to something which gives them equal engagement and freshness of content. Therefore, the chances of running a successful sales training program improve multi-fold by creating engagement and keeping up a high velocity of content. On average, putting out fresh content every day or alternate day is a good way to pique learner’s interest to see what you will come up next. If the overall quality of learning content you put out is interesting, you should see a upward trend in ongoing engagement levels among your users.

So, how does one do that without having to spent enormous amounts of money to create content? Here are a few tips.

Crowd source content

Most of the real wisdom on sales training comes from subject matter experts from within the organization. Leverage that by asking your internal subject matter experts to provide you with content that you can send out to your learners on a regular basis. A large kitty of content you can keep cycling through will ensure that your learners get to see something new every day or week. Use microlearning principles to nugget this content into bite-sized chunks and you can send out something every day. This will keep learners coming back for more. Ensure that your mobile app puts out push notifications so that learners know that fresh content is being populated every day.

Frequent quizzes and contests

Putting together an assessment is far easier than creating learning content from scratch. Create question banks that you can slice and dice into quick assessments. Create weekly contests and let learners visually see their performance through leader boards. The competitive element should naturally appeal to sales people. It does not matter if some questions are repeated from one quiz to the other. In fact, critical aspects or facts about your product should be repetitive to ensure retention, therefore, repeat those questions across multiple quizzes. These assessments can also help you identify gaps in knowledge and understanding.

Leverage social learning

Take a page out of the book of immensely successful social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and use social constructs to ensure content is always moving and fresh. Identify voices of authority among your sales team – for example, a veteran sales person respected by the team or an opinion leader. Ask them to put out micro-nuggets of content, such as an anecdote about their experience while selling. Ask them to post this content on the social learning section of your learning app. Drive engagement by boosting that post in the social network. This will encourage others to share more nuggets and drive repeat visits.

Use games and gaming

The planet spends around 30 billion hours a week playing games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds – this is natural behaviour. Play into this natural behaviour by giving them games to explore and play with. Having a ‘game arcade’ or library of games that they can try out just for ‘fun’ can be a great way to keep them coming back.

Quick authoring

This is the most obvious of them all. It is important to have your actual learning content out there, apart from the social and crowd-sourced aspects of this. Most learning platforms come with quick authoring and if yours doesn’t, you should find one. Quick authoring tools will allow you to create templatized micro-learning nuggets out of existing content. Ensuring that you have a constant pipeline of content being created will allow you to recycle over a period of time, once new learners enter the system.

Remember, learners should be treated more as app users, where the objective is to create engagement and pull, rather than use push methods to get them to consume learning. As soon as you see learning as a marketing problem, solutions start to appear more readily.

By Kamalika Bhattacharya, CEO & Co-Founder at QuoDeck

Q & A, QuoDeck
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Which Learning Management Systems (LMS) are easiest and most affordable for a small company to utilize?

QuoDeck is a game based mobile learning management system. It is designed specifically for corporate learning and priced at a level that makes it particularly suitable for small businesses and startups. We have focused on making it easy for non-instructional designers to get started with team training in 10 minutes flat with your existing content.

That being said, it is powering team trainings in large Fortune 500 companies, so it’s not skimpy on features either.

Do give it a spin and tell us what you think of it…

And if you are looking for a larger alternative, you should look no further than Moodle. Just get a cpanel based hosting solution and you would get a one-click deployment option embedded within. Cost wise this should not exceed $100 a year, but it is a complex to configure and manage the system.

By Arijit Lahiri, Co-Founder of QuoDeck
Employee-Training, Game-based learning, Press, QuoDeck, Start-up's

The Indian Startup Show A Weekly Podcast Show About Indian Startups Entrepreneurs & More! Hosted by Neil Patel & Friends

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Ep69: ­Arijit & Kamalika, Co-founders of QuoDeck – Meet the husband & wife team disrupting the traditional learning industry…One game at a time!

Both share great insights on life as an entrepreneur. The setbacks, the fun, building a team. Getting out of the comfort zone. Management styles, Quitting corporate life after 15 years and how they first met! So please enjoy the show.

To listen to the Podcast.

Corporate Learning and Development, Corporate Learning Best Practices, Employee-Training, Game-based learning, Press, QuoDeck, Start-up's

3 Types of Startups Who Need a Learning Culture to Succeed

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Service-driven startups like cab hailing apps, e-commerce apps, delivery and logistics enterprises, etc. thrive on very specific yet highly competitive ecosystems.

Most startups work towards the one thing which matters most – Survival. In the crucial early years, startups are consumed by solving critical challenges like getting their product/service off the ground, creating differentiation with consumers, hiring the right team and raising capital. Most times this leaves no bandwidth for anything else and lower order priorities like training usually take a backseat – and, rightly so. Most startups can do without structured learning for a very long time, and instead, driving a culture of ‘figuring it out’ and self-learning can help teams remain cutting-edge and current. However, if you are a particular type of startup, then learning is actually quite critical to the success of your business model.

1.    Startups with large field forces

Startups that depend on a large field force to either sell or deliver their product/service to customers, need them to be knowledgeable and be skilled at selling. But, with large field forces come issues such as high attrition and the need for training their replacements faster. As a startup, balanced on the thin edge of efficient capital consumption and delivering a world-class brand experience to customers, these costs can prove very dear.

Startup founders typically, expect field force managers to teach incoming employees on-the-job or through 1-2 day-long classroom sessions, to equip them with all the knowledge regarding the product/service, its differentiation, processes, and skills related to selling and issue handling. That can be a lot to absorb in such a short time span! However, what startups don’t realize is that the willingness to commit this time to train may differ from manager to manager as may the ability to train, resulting in a lopsided field force where some are trained to deliver better than others. And one of the fastest ways to kill a brand is inconsistent brand experience with customers.

Such startups can benefit enormously from having structured learning and onboarding programs, that incoming field force is mandatorily required to go through in their initial few days. With advancing learning technology, such structured programs are now delivered with ease through mobile devices with micro-learning that is consumed on-the-go. Ultimately, the cost of such a program is offset by the benefits of consistency of brand experience resulting in growth and scale.

2.    Startups who run an ecosystem

Service-driven startups like cab hailing apps, e-commerce apps, delivery and logistics enterprises, etc. thrive on very specific yet highly competitive ecosystems. Features such as one-day delivery, pick-up & drop services, returns, and home trial add enormous pressures on logistics teams in startups. Conversely, the differentiating factor is not always the product/service itself, but the quality of hospitality and customer care provided, which is actually delivered by the ecosystem.

Compared to the previous type of startup, the need for training this ecosystem comes from two fronts – Process and Brand Experience. Ecosystem partners deal with both major stakeholders involved – with the startup (seller) and the customer (buyer). Understanding processes which may include critical aspects like authentication, cash handling, timely delivery and pickup, returns etc. is imperative for ecosystem partners. And every partner of this ecosystem doubles up as a brand ambassador, therefore they need to understand the brand experience they are supposed to deliver.

If such an ecosystem is at the center of a startup’s business model, then founders need to ensure that the ecosystem represents and communicates the brand experience founders have envisaged. This, however, cannot be done quickly and is a long-term process. Startups need to analyze the role of each partner, design training programs accordingly and ensure the same is communicated to them on a regular basis.

3.    Startups with complex product/service offerings

Startups with complex product/service offerings such as technology products, fin-tech or medical tech have a unique requirement. Their offering is typically based on a thorough understanding of the domain and the issues with existing products/services, which can be sometimes fairly complex subject matter. Not only historical context, it is important for such companies to keep abreast of the advances and latest developments in their domain. Sometimes, the requirement can be as simple as knowing new regulations in the industry that affect your product/service.

As such startups grow and hire, whether it is sales and marketing, product development, Operations or HR, translating this context and understanding is important and needs to be done continually. Such startups would benefit from building up a repository of knowledge that is available for reference or learning as needed.

By Kamalika Bhattacharya, CEO & Co-Founder at QuoDeck

This article was first published on BWDisrupt