Some of the most valuable employee development isn’t happening in your company’s formal training programs. It’s happening in everyday moments when experienced teams share their knowledge, answer questions and help co-workers develop new skills.
The best employee development is happening on the shop floor, at a customer site, behind a counter and inside the cab of a truck. It’s the experienced team member showing a co-worker the best way to complete a task.
Forward-thinking training leaders recognize an opportunity to amplify the impact of their existing programs by capturing this expertise and making it available across the entire organization.
Instead of creating more training from scratch, they turn everyday moments into valuable employee development resources that benefit everyone.
No studio, professional camera crew or six weeks of production required – just a phone and a few minutes to capture and share. In fact, sophisticated editing may distract from what matters most: The knowledge being shared.
Team members are already teaching one another every day, yes, but most of these lessons disappear as soon as the conversation ends. Capturing valuable institutional knowledge creates an easy and cost-effective opportunity for employee development.
Stop Creating Training and Start Capturing It
Traditional training development usually starts with a need to improve and a big blank page.
Someone identifies the topic to bridge a gap in skills, improve a process or provide uniformity. Then a subject matter expert is found, and the instructional designer or HR team has to figure out how to write and present the content, build the course, and distribute it.
Traditional LMS content can take an average of 48 hours to develop for every one hour of finished training. Based on an average instructional designer wage of $47.48 per hour, that course costs roughly $2,280 in labor before it’s even launched – a significant amount of time, money and energy recreating something that’s already happening every day.
Instead of asking, What training should we create? start asking, What’s happening in our organization right now that other employees should see?
Maybe one crew has developed a faster way to complete an equipment inspection. Maybe your highest-performing salesperson asks a question that consistently improves conversations with customers. Maybe an experienced technician has learned how to spot a problem before it becomes an expensive repair.
The content is there; you just need to capture it and share with other people in the organization.
Your People Are Already Subject Matter Experts
When companies hear “subject matter expert,” they imagine someone with decades of credentials or fancy degrees. But expertise often looks much less formal.
It’s the employee everyone calls when a machine starts making that noise. It’s the supervisor who can immediately tell when a new hire has skipped a step. It’s the customer service rep who knows exactly how to calm an angry customer.
These team members have developed knowledge through experience. They’ve made mistakes, solved problems and figured out what works under the actual constraints of the job. Their expertise – if recorded and shared in a searchable library – becomes an invaluable source for employee development.
The concept is similar to the “bright spots” approach.
When Jerry Sternin was tasked with addressing childhood malnutrition in Vietnam with virtually no resources, he didn’t begin by importing an elaborate outside solution. He couldn’t afford it. Instead, he looked for families within the same communities whose children were healthier.
He found behaviors that were already producing better outcomes and helped the community replicate them. Within six months, 65% of participating children were better nourished, and the program eventually reached 2.2 million people across 265 villages.
To maximize your company’s employee development program for the least amount of effort and cost, look at what’s already working inside your organization before searching outside it for the answer.
Start With the Questions People Keep Asking
You don’t need to capture everything your people do. In fact, you shouldn’t. The most useful training content usually answers one specific question.
Think about the questions managers and experienced team members hear repeatedly like:
- How do I complete this inspection?
- What should I do if the customer says this?
- How do I enter this information correctly?
- What’s the most efficient, yet safest way to perform this task?
- Why do we do this step first?
If one person has asked it, someone else probably will too – and likely at the same stage of that employee’s development. Instead of answering the question over and over, capture the answer once and make it available whenever co-workers need it.
Keep Each Video Focused on One Thing
One of the easiest ways to make a useful training video entirely un-useful is to keep adding things. Instead, give each video one job using a simple, four-part structure:
Question → Answer → The Why → Result
Start with the situation employees might encounter. Show them what to do. Explain why it works. Then finish with the most important thing they should remember.
For example:
Question: Why do I need to make sure loads are always secured?
Answer: Unsecured loads are dangerous and cause 19,000 traffic accidents each year.
The Why: Securing loads and equipment properly prevents damage to vehicles and
even saves lives.
Result: Doing a thorough pre-check before you get behind the wheel will help you avoid expensive citations and prevent roadway incidents, so you – and the other drivers around you – get home safe.
See the resulting microlearning video from this outline at: http://www.tyfoom.com/sample-microlearning-video-and-outline-pre-trip-inspection.
SHOW the Work…
Some things can be explained perfectly in writing and are still hard to understand. For example, imagine describing how to tie a complicated knot without pictures.
You could write six paragraphs detailing where the rope goes. Or someone could show you how to do it in 30 seconds.
Workplace training has the same problem. Processes involving equipment, tools, movement or physical environments are often easier to understand when people can see them performed.
Instead of taking an employee away from the work to recreate a process in a classroom, record the process where it actually happens. Let them see the equipment, environment and sequence of steps.
Because the examples come from the real workplace, employee development becomes connected to the exact situations team members actually encounter.
…But Keep It Under 2 Minutes
A common myth pervades workplace training that more content equals better training. Quite the opposite – more content is just more content. We tend to tune out after about 120 seconds, so keep employee-driven training videos to two minutes or less. If a topic can’t be explained clearly within that window, break it into several videos.
This time constraint forces the person creating the lesson to decide what actually matters. It also makes content much easier for team members to use.
Watching a two-minute demonstration when you need an answer feels reasonable. Searching through a 45-minute course to find the same answer does not.
Short videos also make employee development easy to fit into the workday.
Build a Library, Not a Camera Roll
The value of employee-created training is the expertise, not the production quality. Team members don’t need their coworker to look like a professional presenter. They just need to see how to do the job correctly.
Lowering the production barrier also makes employee development easier to scale because creating a lesson doesn’t become a project. A team member can point, shoot and share while the information is still relevant.
But capturing everyday work is only half the equation: People need to be able to find it.
Content should be organized around how employees actually look for answers. Use clear titles, group related topics, and make content searchable by job, skill, process or problem. In other words, think less like a course catalog and more like a search engine.
Your Next Training Video is Happening Right Now
Traditional training positions employees primarily as learners. User-generated training allows them to become teachers too, and employee development moves beyond course completion. Team members learn, apply, contribute and teach. Their experience becomes useful beyond their immediate team, shift or location.
Remember:
- Capture the question
- Explain why it works
- Keep it short
- Make it searchable
Do this consistently and employee development stops depending solely on courses, classrooms and training departments. It becomes part of the work itself.
Learn how you can create better training by hitting “record” on what’s already working by scheduling a meeting to speak with a Tyfoom training consultant today.