Just about everyone in your organization has valuable information and experience they can contribute. The processes, standards, cultural values and general information unique to your organization represent critical institutional knowledge.
But how can your organization ensure this institutional knowledge gets to the employees, especially across teams and functions, who need to know it?
Microlearning for macro results
“Microlearning” is any brief training content that has a specific objective. Focused on specific learner outcomes and usually lasting five minutes or less, microlearning provides valuable information in short, easy-to-digest bursts. And when employees can access the courses through their mobile devices, they can receive the training whenever and wherever it’s convenient for them.
When organizations empower managers and other leaders to create microlearning courses, it allows institutional knowledge to be dispersed more broadly. Because this type of training is less formal than traditional classroom learning, developing the content takes less time and can be done by anyone with a smartphone.
That’s because microlearning isn’t just larger trainings broken into nuggets. Rather, it’s designed to deliver quick, focused information that inspires the learner to take action. For example, if there’s a trick to making a process work efficiently or an important nuance to servicing an account, your workforce can retain that institutional knowledge by making a two-minute video to share with employees and store in the organization’s learning and development library – ensuring the knowledge is kept for future business growth and innovation.
Additionally, research from the Journal of Educational Computing Research reveals microlearning can increase knowledge retention rates by more than 20% over long-form training, further underscoring its rightful place in your employee learning repertoire.
Creating informal videos with ease
You don’t need a high-end studio camera or Hollywood production experience to make impactful videos. Informal microlearning units are the perfect place for quick videos that demonstrate an area of expertise you want to preserve within your organization.
They are also a cost-effective approach to banking institutional knowledge. A simple message shot at a manager’s desk can verbalize his or her tacit knowledge while providing a way to share it over and over without additional cost or time.
Paycom Learning’s Video Content Creator feature allows users to easily upload and edit videos for informal microlearning and other interactive content. By simply recording once, information can be shared across the organization to reach remote employees, bring new hires up to speed and more.
As your business evolves, sharing institutional knowledge can become increasingly difficult. To ensure your organization’s expertise doesn’t disappear when employees change roles, use short videos to catalog important information for informal microlearning courses that can make a big impact on your long-term success.