We’re easily fooled to push out too much information at the same time when we want to teach our coworkers something new. If we instead try to educate on an overall level, we can create a general understanding of the new information. Working this way, we also let them get the detailed information at a later time – provided there is support for that, of course.
When learning something new, we are not always receptive to everything being taught. Especially so when we start a new job where we have to learn a lot during a concentrated period of time. An overload of information along with the negative ”forgetting curve” causes us to quickly forget the details we just learned.
Our customers often says: “We have to think differently and actually start educating on an overall level and not in detail. The users can learn the details when they are in need insted, in their actual workday”. To be able to learn on your own requires that the conditions are set up for it. For general topics, such as how to create pivot tables in Excel, Google and other public sources are helpful. But for business-specific topics, the business itself needs to create the very material of knowledge.
One of our customers who has adopted this is the municipality of Säffle, where they created "The Social Intranet", a comprehensive introduction to the social functions of the intranet. The introduction is created as a “Step-by-Step Guide” in InfoCaption with both video and screen recordings along with narration. The focus of the guide is not to go into all the details, but to get the employees to understand and use the social functions of the intranet. When needed, employees can search for other, more detailed guides to learn more about the specific features in the intranet.
Click here to see the guide.
Tess Winborg, who created the guide, describes the thought process behind it:
”When introducing the new social intranet in 2018, we quickly realized the need to create guides to introduce and educate our employees. We created a number of guides on the various functions of the intranet. To include all employees and guide them how to become active and social on the intranet, we created the more comprehensive guide "The social intranet".
The guide covers the social functions of the intranet, whith the primary focus on showing employees how they can work in their activity flows through writing, sharing and liking posts.”
At InfoCaption we think this is a perfect example on how short and simple an initial introduction to something can be, when you provide the opportunity of subsequent learning material. Another great thing with Säffle municipality's guide is that they start with an introductory video, which makes it more personal and you get almost get the feeling of being in a real classroom. We think this to be a well-deserved winner of the guide of the month in October!
Congratualtions and well done to:
Tess Winborg, municipality of Säffle
/Team InfoCaption
As a thank you to the persons/organization that has created the winning guide of the month, InfoCaption donates 1000 SEK to a nonprofit organization, which provides education or in any other way aid people into the labor market.
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