Performance Support Improves Business Outcomes

In enterprises that are implementing talent management andtalent development strategies, including especially talent marketplacestrategies, performance support offers several key advantages.

Are these important to you?

• Reduced time to effective performance
• Rapid response to change
• Continuous improvement
• Measureable business impact

Performance support’s value is that it accomplishes thesebenefits while reducing or eliminating the need to take people away from work fortraining, for updating, for coaching, and for responding to their questions.

In this article, I’m not going to dive into the details ofhow to build a performance support system. That is for another time and anotherplace, and perhaps for another person within your organization. Instead, I’mgoing to outline, in as few words as possible, the business value ofperformance support that you, as an executive or decision-maker, should knowabout.

What performance support delivers

Performance support provides employees with the ability towork effectively every time, everywhere, including at the moment of change, byembedding the capability for adaptive response in the workflow. In ten seconds,with two clicks, employees can get information that they have been taught buthave forgotten, or the guidance they need to cover situations they were nevertaught. Performance support excels at producing this accelerated learning.

Sustaining performance in a world of change

Performance support not only accelerates and reinforces learning,it sustains the performer in a world where change is constantly taking place. Themost misunderstood moment of need is the moment of change, when the performermust immediately unlearn what was previously learned and immediately performdifferently. That is a very difficult thing to do. The capability for adaptiveresponse, embedded in the workflow, is the most critically needed resource intoday’s world of continuous change. Performance support provides this resource.

Intentional orchestration

Organizations are flush with information, guidance, advice,assistance, lessons learned, and reference material, but it’s scatteredeverywhere. At the moment people need it, they don’t know where it is, or eventhat it’s there. They won’t or can’t take the time to find it. Instead, theymay make their best guess or they may take someone else away from their work. Continuousimprovement relies on the continuous availability on the job of accurateinformation and guidance.

Performance support intentionally orchestrates all thoseresources and delivers the right information at the moment of need, which maybe any one of five cases:

• When someone is learning how to do something new
• When someone is expanding the breadth and depthof what they have learned
• When someone needs to apply what they havelearned (and perhaps forgotten)
• When something goes wrong and someone has tosolve a problem
• When someone needs to change deeply ingrainedskills or practices

What will your organization do?

Large organizations, those where employees performjudgment-based work as well as those that rely on adherence to detailedprocedures, are incorporating performance support into their talent managementand talent development. If you are concerned about ensuring excellentperformance of employees when they encounter the five situations I’ve justoutlined, and most especially the last one, the moment of change, look atperformance support more closely for its measureable business impact.