While many countries are not yet clear of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are seeing society slowly return, in some instances, to pre-pandemic life. People are starting to congregate in locations… and if you’re fully vaccinated, you can do so without a mask in most situations.

The same can be said about work.

Organizations such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase have stated they are bringing workers back to the office. Other companies such as HPE and Twitter have permanently adopted flexible work programs brought on by the pandemic. Many organizations are struggling with this decision, asking questions such as:

• Should employees continue to work from home?
• Should they be brought back into the office full-time?
• Should there be a hybrid approach?

The decision-making process on this particular issue faces some challenges. For instance, many employees work more effectively and efficiently at home. Others don’t. How does an organization determine which ones fall into which category?

Another challenge falls around the idea there needs to be some employee assistance in the office for the less experienced employees.

Complicating matters further, companies electing a hybrid option face challenges ensuring seamless computing experiences for employees that shuttle back and forth between multiple locations and devices.

“When COVID hit, many companies were forced to change policies and reconfigure their business,” Knoa CEO Brian Berns said. “So, the challenge is, how do you really understand what the people are doing?”

The Learning Calculus

The Challenges for Learning Leaders

For learning leaders – the future of their operation depends on which strategy company leadership decides to pursue. Providing learning for work-from-home employees is different in many ways than providing learning for those employees who are in the office.

So, this leads to some questions.

1. What are leaders looking for in terms of options to address these possible working environments?
2. What are companies doing to address the needs of their employees, whether they be in house, full remote or hybrid employees?

“So, I think there's a couple things to think about there,” Josh Tambor said. He’s a customer success manager with Knoa Software.

“If you think about the amount of off-site learning that was done before the pandemic and the opportunities to go to seminars, and training opportunities, and at some point, those were really treated as a luxury item,” Tambor said. “I think part of what we're going to start to see is companies are now going to start to invest in that on a broader scale. They have to be able to present learning options both in house and out of house in a way, which is a meaningful tool for talent retention.”

How does an organization make that determination, however? That’s where Knoa comes in. Knoa’s user experience management software can, based on an employee’s interaction with company systems, determine the level of proficiency of each employee. From there, it can help determine the next set of training the employee may need to step up his/her/their proficiency. One way to do that is through the tracking of adoption and user error rates.

“So, we can track software adoption and user error rates, and convert those into proficiency and efficiency metrics,” Tambor said.

Source: Knoa

“Then we can start to convert those into cost savings that you can take to an executive and say, ‘Hey… an x% reduction in this one error message can actually save you half a million dollars over the course of six months for a business unit.’ Think about that compelling discussion to take that to a steering committee and say, you invested $20,000 worth of training to get a $500,000 return on investment.”

This is great information to have, but it’s just information. How do you put it into practice; what do you do with the information you’ve been given?

Berns says, “Take some corrective course of action. Train your users… Post project, Knoa can measure the increase in productivity and efficiencies and decrease in error rates.”

Defining the Metrics

Now, there are a lot of metrics Knoa and similar technologies can provide. In addition to the error rates, here are some other metrics to measure.

In Summation

As we exit the pandemic, the desire to determine the organization’s next steps are critical to its survival. Data, as Berns and Tambor explained, can provide insight into learning opportunities both now and in the future. It is a proverbial crystal ball. By leaning on data gleamed from either a user experience management software or a similar technology, learning leaders can better evaluate the effectiveness of their programs and make changes where changes are needed.