This morning I cam across an L&D podcast from Good practice titled, 'How can L&D support performance?' The podcast feature JD Dillon of Axonify, Ross Garnet of Goodpractrice and Owen Ferguson. I summarised a list of personal lessons which i am sharing below. You can access the podcast at: http://podcast.goodpractice.com/59-how-can-ld-support-performance

My lessons from the podcast:

• When implementing L&D solutions:
• Start from the frontline or shop floor and work backwards
• Ask the question – what can we do to help people today to solve a problem or make something happen?
• If we support people daily they feel more valued and see L&D as more valuable.
• If you help people solve problems today they will trust you for the future. If you don’t solve problem today they will be sceptical about long term strategic initiatives.
• Focus on immediate, short term programmes that solves immediate problems to build trust. This is about starting with day to day in build and knocking out the small things that cause people’s problems. Let’s solve the simple problems before they grow into big problems.
• Make information easier to find and if people need it they will find it. Put information where people can find it so they can solve their own problems.
• Start with easy information access and then use elearning or classroom training as a last resort.

Creating and sharing performance support:

• Screen recording tasks to solve specific problems
• Focus on being connected to the world and share those connections for other people to learn. Foster connections for everyone to benefit.

Possible task for me: Use Excel to build a Curated platform

• L&D has a task to create content sometimes and find out what already exists and help to share with people that need it.
• Building an organisational wiki that is started by learning and development but grown by people no necessarily by L&D.
• Social tools will not necessarily work in the work place as they work in the world because there are different motivations for using them.

What is good performance support:

• Good performance support helps someone get something done or solve a problem at that moment. It leans into the five moments of need. It’s almost done in sustainable way.
• It is that thing that a person can consult to solve a problem. It will look different for different organisations and job roles and there is not one tool that you can plug in and conclude that you have got it right.

To build a good PS:

• answer the question – what’s the simple thing I can do here that will help people solve a problem. Think – why build a course when a sheet of paper will do.
• Create a subject matter expert list
• Ask and compile managers what their issues are and identify what the pertinent issues are and focus PS on that.
• Idea: Do a quick and dirty survey of the managers you support – what are the top 3 to 6 daily performance problems that you face at the moment?

Two types of PS:

• On demand – it’s available but you have to seek it out – there needs to be an initial motivation to use it.
• In demand – receiving help while performing a task without you having to ask for it.

The whole point of learning in the workplace is to help people do their jobs better. For L&D to be effective we need to:

• See what the problems are
• Know the most efficient and effective learning ways to solve the problems
• Connect people to those solutions
• How do you drive engagement with performance support?
• Show meaningful value
• Prove that something you want to provide works in certain parts of the organisation with certain people.