Peter Shepherd once stated, “Communication is the solvent of all problems and is the foundation for personal development.” Simply put, poor communication causes problems, while good communication prevents or solves them.
When you apply this simple principle to how you train and develop your people – how you set expectations through SOPs and best practices, communicate consistently, and share innovations, lessons learned, and success stories – you create alignment.
And, with that alignment, wouldn’t you naturally reduce workplace injuries, cut rework, boost productivity and performance, lower turnover, and strengthen your company culture and overall business?
Of course you would. I am sure everyone agrees that if you can improve communication in the workplace, you can improve all aspects of your overall business.
Yet, we continue to use message boards, newsletters, email, trickle-down communication and other methods that are not effective. You have no idea if everyone got the same clear consistent message of critical information they needed to do their job safely and effectively.
Even in-person trainings and meetings (which can be the most effective) are typically done in large groups, on an occasional basis, with large dumps of information, for a longer duration, where the attention, engagement and retention is low. And you still have no idea if everyone got the message.
What if you had a microlearning app to achieve clear and effective communication?
Gain Clarity in Your Communication and Save Money
Imagine if you could connect with your entire audience, specific groups, or individuals, to share relevant and critical information with a microlearning and communication app, where you can see and have documentation they received that information to do their job safely and effectively?
Well, you can. It’s amazing, and has proven to help prevent accidents and incidents, rework and confusion that leads to wasted time, errors and failures.
Rework in the construction industry averages around 5-9% for direct costs. When you take into account the indirect costs, such as schedule delays and loss of productivity, this can often end up being 15-30% of the project costs. And the leading cause of rework is poor communication and documentation.
To paint a conservative picture, if you had a $50M project, and let’s say it performed above average and the rework accounted for 5% of the project, that’s $2.5M in rework costs!
If you could reduce the rework, even if only by a conservative amount of 10% with an effective way of communicating, that’s still a $250k reduction in losses associated with rework. Regardless of the project size, or percent of rework, it shows that this small investment in a microlearning app to help communicate more effectively can tremendously increase the amount of profitability on every project.
When you fill your communication gaps with an effective app for training and communication, you build this foundation of effective communication and trust that sets your people up for success, instead of poor training and communication that sets them up for failure.
Onboard Faster and Smarter
About 60% of workplace incidents happen in an employee’s first year on the job. And approximately 36% of employees report being placed in unsafe situations due to poor communication.
Some studies have even shown that 80-90% of fatal incidents in the workplace are directly related to inadequate training and poor communication.
These are mind-blowing statistics! These are completely preventable incidents. These are lives you could save simply by improving your onboarding and continuous training and communication with an effective system.
I am going to explain this through the life cycle of an employee, comparing typical and conventional methods, verses utilizing a microlearning app for accelerated development and effective communication.
Congratulations, you just hired a new employee! Time to put them through the company onboarding and get them out there in the mix.
Did you know that you are two times more likely to have turnover with a poor onboarding process? In most cases, this consists of a one- to two-hour orientation, where you review company information, typical safety hazards and controls, scopes of work, and company and HR policies.
Then the new hires get a large binder of policies and documents and sign some papers. And guess what? By tomorrow, they’ll forget about 70% of that information and roughly 90% in a week.
In some cases. they may be a part of a 30/60/90 plan, possibly involved in a mentorship or coaching program, and get an opportunity to transition into the normal speed of business.
But usually this is not the case. Employees are thrown to the wolves, getting in the mix right away, and will get occasional training and communication as needed.
While nothing can replace strategic and specific hands-on training and development, what if you could combine this with microlearning videos through an app to increase engagement, retention, and easy accessibility of the training and communication they need to know to do their jobs safety and effectively?
For example, badges tied to their orientation training and onboarding process, skill-set training, task specific training and all regulatory and best practice information they need to be successful.
You would also have all of the training retention competency documented, and scored through gamification to make it engaging, fun and competitive. Everything that you would normally sign on paper or have in a big binder can be accessible to employees in a couple clicks at any time. Meanwhile, management has visibility and quick access to this documentation.
Utilizing a microlearning app for the onboarding of a new employee tremendously increases the opportunity of their success, while reducing the opportunity of turnover in their early employment stage.
Poor Communication Derails the Best Onboarding Plans
Then your employees work from their new hire status into an effective frontline worker. They get training occasionally as needed. They get communication via message boards, newsletters, weekly toolbox talks, or the occasional monthly, quarterly or annual meetings.
Again, leadership has no peace of mind that the employees understood the information they needed and the only proof this communication took place is probably a sign-in sheet. But you can do better than this.
This is where employees get disengaged because of the occasional system of inconsistent communication.This is what creates problems. This is what leads to accidents and incidents. This is what leads to errors, defects and rework. This is what leads to missed deadlines, inefficiencies and loss of productivity.
Microlearning Apps Bridge the Communication Gap
You could be using a microlearning app to connect, engage and communicate effectively with your people in real time every day. And again, it’s gamified to make it fun and competitive. Your people can be receiving relevant 2-minute microlearning videos and communication daily to keep safety, quality and productivity top of mind.
You can send new policies and have immediate visibility of who has signed them and who hasn’t. You can send relevant documentation for safety, operations, HR and all aspects of your business, and keep employee benefits and other document resources at their fingertips.
You can send communication messages in real time about success stories, failures and lessons learned, Information about upcoming events, and anything you want with the peace of mind that every person received and acknowledged that message.
Imagine being able to communicate this effectively throughout your daily grind with your entire workforce about critical information about clients, products, accomplishments, defects, failures, successes, injuries, weather, milestones, upcoming projects and more. All while keeping your team aligned on company values, mission, goals, SOPs, and BPs.
And you keep everything that matters most top of mind to impact behaviors and your company culture for continuous improvement.
This, no doubt, results in reducing workplace injuries, rework, and all types of losses while increasing performance and productivity to directly impact profitability. This is where the rubber meets the road – a direct conduit of effective communication, to each and every one of your frontline workers who are your key to production and profitability.
Find Your Next Generation of Leaders
Having a microlearning app can also help accelerate development for your up-and-coming leaders. Instead of taking your best workers and putting them in leadership roles because they are good at what they do, but have not had any leadership training, setting them up for failure as a leader, you can incorporate regular and consistent training and communication on a daily basis to prepare them to be successful when it is time for them to take on a leadership role.
This is a non-disruptive way to ensure leadership training is consistent and readily available to prepare your workforce for their potential opportunities, without taking time away from existing leadership.
Utilizing microlearning in the same way also applies directly to ongoing leadership training, continuing education and development. Your current managers and leaders are busy managing their teams. If you provide them with regular, consistent drip-feed training and communication to help improve their daily practices and leadership skills without taking much time away from their daily routine and schedule, this can tremendously help them be more successful.
And the great thing about using a microlearning app in this capacity is that all of this is customized for individual or team or group roles and responsibilities for their respective business units.
Harnessing the Power of Microlearning Apps in Your Organization
I am sure you tell yourself regularly that you wish you could be out there where the work is being performed more often to watch how things are being done, interact with the workforce to ask what they need to be more successful, give compliments, feedback, and make better connections with your people – but it is hard to get out there consistently.
With a microlearning app like Tyfoom, you can accomplish more, be more places at once and connect your spread-out workforce with effective communication from the top down, with virtual connections to your people via videos, messages, digital forms and more.
In today’s world, you need to leverage yourself and your management team as well as possible and modernize and transform the way you train and communicate with your people.
Microlearning is just the tool to accomplish this and make greater impacts to your people and business. Current communication methods are failing and creating problems and losses for your people and business. Prevent these problems and losses today and build a stronger future with effective communication.
Learn how by scheduling a meeting to speak with a Tyfoom training consultant today.