Agility in Content Authoring Is the Strategy You Need Now

We all know by now that “normal” really doesn’t exist in the workplace anymore. We still have many people working remotely or they’re recovering from contracting the latest variant of COVID and just waiting for that “negative” test result to return to work in person. That means the hybrid workplace is here to stay. 

The thing is supporting a hybrid workforce puts a lot of pressure on companies, managers, operational teams, and the L&D team. Making sure people know what they need to do in their jobs with a scattered team can still be challenging. The reality is however, that mistakes are costly and customers are unforgiving.

Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst, at Aragon Research points out that no matter what is going on with your workforce or where they are, they still need to perform—and the key to ensuring high performance is quality training and learning content. 

Workplace Agility

Workplace agility promotes smart and collaborative work among employees, fostering increased productivity and seamless effort. It emphasizes efficiency and effectiveness rather than mere hard work, enabling teams to achieve more with less effort and achieve better outcomes.

The Evolution of Learning and Training Content

In the workplace, training and learning has moved from text and documents to visual content. Most people can absorb concepts faster through a visual representation than from reading tons of pages. Then there’s also been a leap from information to knowledge. 

Piles of pages with information didn’t transfer into a skill on the job as well as being able to see interrelationships between bits of information in context. There was a slow march toward digital transformation but the urgency wasn’t present until COVID. 

COVID marked the beginning of the end of paper documents. Traditional paper-based training and learning content was rapidly transferred into digital forms because there was no choice. L&D organizations discovered that digital learning requires more than simply tracking who took the training but what content was needed when, and even how. 

Why Content Agility is Key to Operational Success

If your competitor is doing a better job of training their employees, nine times out of ten they’ll out perform your employees. 

Why? Because they’re being proactive in engaging employees to serve customers better in a contextual way that makes sense on the job. 

The secret sauce to high-performing teams is better training and learning. 

Quality training and learning content is key. To deliver better content, your L&D team must be as agile as possible in content authoring. They’ve got to make changes to content on the fly, as business or the market shifts. Content agility also means the ability to collaborate across the business with subject matter experts (SMEs) without waiting for them to be available—by making it as easy as possible for those SMEs to make edits or changes.

Your L&D team also has to be purposeful in what kind of content they create: video, how-tos, short chunks of digestible, interactive content, and more. What’s more is they’ve got to understand how that content is being used and whether it’s effective in helping employees do their jobs better. 

Best Practices to Transform Training and Learning Content

Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst, at Aragon Research shares his view of the best practices he sees from high-performing companies when it comes to training and learning content. 

Understanding how each person on your team collaborates to know what kinds of content will be needed. Then, it’s important to ensure that your team has the right tools and access to those tools wherever they might be working. Also, developing learning paths with a set of skills is a great way to guide employees through critical training for the best outcomes.

Watch Jim Lundy’s presentation: Work Will Never Be Normal – Why Content Agility is the Answer, for more best practices and insights.