Marc My Words: Five Reasons to Use Performance Support

Want to learnabout performance support? Read The eLearning Guild’s just-published whitepaper, At the Moment of Need: The Case for Performance Support. Get your boss to read it, share it withyour colleagues, and discuss it with your team. But, inevitably, someone willask you to give a quick “elevator speech” about why you should use performancesupport. Here are five good reasons.

Performance support comes in many flavors

First, a definition: Performance support isa tool or other resource, ranging from print to technology-supported, whichprovides just the right amount of task guidance, support, and productivitybenefits to the user, precisely at the moment of need. There are many variations of this definition, just as there are manyvariations of performance support types.

Performance support can be as simple as a job aid that reminds us of the things wehave to do, in the order we have to do them, so we don’t have to memorize everything.Recipes and assembly instructions are classic examples. Performance support canbe an online information resource that helps us find quick answers to questions.Wikipedia may have its issues, but think of how work in your organization mightbe different if every job has a Wikipedia-like resource to support it. Performancesupport can also be an online tool that helps us make decisions (sometimesreferred to as decision support). Examples range from selecting the rightinvestments to picking the right pet.

Performance support is often a blinding flash of the obvious;just look around

Is there adocument no one understands, a process that’s too hard to follow, or a softwareapplication that doesn’t work right? You know them when you see them … yetinstead of fixing the problem, we often use (or someone tells us to use)training to compensate for the bad document, teach a work-around to the badprocess, or provide coping strategies for the irritating software. The nexttime these documents, processes, and tools are up for revision, try performancesupport. Build it into the solution to provide the assistance people need—when theyneed it. Better still, build performance support into new documents, processes, and tools at inception, to insure thatthey, and the people who use them, work better and smarter from day one.

Performance support makes money

Training isexpensive. The expense is often justified, but how much time and how many resourcescan any organization really devote to it? The productivity of employees intraining is zero. Instead, what if we could embed more performance support intothe workplace? What if, instead of taking a course, even eLearning, we couldconsult an online knowledgebase, quickly and easily? Or, instead of looking foran expert to show us how to do something, the system could demonstrate it tous? We get precisely the information and help we need, precisely when we needit. And we get back to work much, much faster.

Scalabilityenhances these economies further. You can scale performance support used bysmall groups to serve entire organizations very quickly and cost-effectively. Thereare no additional instructors to staff, no extra classrooms to build, no travelto pay for, and, most important of all, no extended downtime from the job. Beyondemployees, think of how performance support can lower the cost of providing customerservice and enhancing customers’ satisfaction.

Performance support improves training

Do you have toomany multi-day classes filled with endless PowerPoint presentations, which arenot as effective as you would like? The best training is evolving away fromthis, focusing more on problem solving, teamwork, innovation, experimentation,ideation, and creative solutions to business challenges, all guided by aninstructor who is more coach than lecturer. Where does performance support fitin?

Performancesupport is a critical component of this new learning model. You can spend muchmore class time using performance support in the context of real-world workissues. In-class practice with performance support can be very beneficial whenlearners return to the workplace because they’ve already had experiences withthe tools they need to do their jobs better. And good eLearning, providedbefore or after an instructor-led class (or instead of one), could fulfill thesame role, helping people use the actual tools they will need to be successfulon the job. And all those PowerPoint slides? Many can be moved to onlineknowledgebases that can be accessed anytime and anywhere.

If we don’t, someone else will

Moving to performancesupport is inevitable, not as a replacement for training, but as another optionin our toolkit that will likely change when and how we train. Productivity and efficiency aside, approaching every performanceproblem with training is simply not affordable. If we pulled everyone off theirjob for training (classroom or online) on everything they need to know or do, noreal work would ever get done. Moreover, if we allow sub-optimal tools and resourcesto exist in the workplace while suggesting that someone else will fix thoseproblems … you know what? Someone else will. The fact is that frontlinemanagers and executives are increasingly looking for ways to get better resultsfrom their people without taking them away from the work so much. They arepushing for this, whether they use the term “performance support” or not. Arewe listening? This has important implications for us.

For the trainingand eLearning community—managers, designers, instructors, and more—thechallenge is clear. We do not abdicate learning by moving to performancesupport, we enhance it. Our clients and customers still value high-qualitytraining, but if we show them the potential of performance support, they willvalue us more.

Want to learn more?

The Performance Support Symposium 2013, September 9 – 10 inBoston, Massachusetts, offers you an exceptional opportunity to discover howyou can optimize investments in training, eLearning, and mLearning byintegrating performance support across your organization. You are invited tojoin other senior learning professionals for this deep exploration ofstrategies, case studies, best practices, and technologies for performancesupport. It’s time to transform performance across your enterprise. You willfind more information, a video overview, a downloadable brochure on the symposium,and registration information here.