The shift towards performance support is a journey—a journey that is just beginning for many organizations. For other organizations, the journey has been ongoing. They have encountered challenges and barriers and built strategies to overcome them. There is much that can be learned from an organization that has already travelled down the performance support road. 

The know-it-all’s days are over. No more is the single person who has all of the answers valued in an organization. This person represents not an asset, but a risk. However, knowing that the information the expert has needs to be shared is the easy part; enabling them to share is something else.

At first blush, the mobile platform seems like an ideal performance support delivery approach. First, there is an audience in need of training reinforcement as they return to the workplace after instructor-led and eLearning formal training. Secondly, nearly everyone has a mobile device in their possession—even on the job—these days, whether it is their personal device or supplied by the enterprise. The good news is that it truly is an ideal performance support opportunity. Learners need useful content on the job and at the time of need. The bad news is that there are a myriad of ways to do it wrong or ineffectively.

Delivering precise information in real time is vital in successful implementation of any performance support strategy or system. Due to the on-demand and just-in-time nature of performance support, pre-defined and structured content results in multiple issues including undesired performance, pushing irrelevant information, lack of interest, and more. Knowing that linear learning is not capable of fulfilling performance support needs, many organizations are unsure about choosing the right path for creating content.

Performance support is a journey, not a destination. What works for an organization that is just starting down this road looks very different from what works for an organization that has been effectively utilizing performance support strategies for years.

When formal learning finishes, we release learners back into their everyday reality, back into a structure that includes both formal hierarchies of support as well as social structures we can call “tribes.“ These are the communities where workers make sense of the learning and rehearse new behaviors. But we don‘t have to leave this to chance. If we understand how these tribes form, how these communities work, and the types of roles we play in them, we can better support learners in these sense-making activities. All too often, we rely on the technology to do this, while in reality it‘s a social issue. Technology can‘t deliver great performance support without functioning communities, coherent tribes behind it.

As a rapidly-growing cloud-based software platform, Avalara faced the challenge of doubling the number of customers implementing their software while growing the implementation team by less than 20 percent during the same time period. They needed to shift from a one-on-one and hands-on approach to software implementation in a scalable approach that enables customers to implement software on their own.

It is critical to have leadership support and funding for performance support to move forward. However, without proper personnel and expertise, there will not be desirable penetrations of performance support strategy. How can an organization build a team that is focused on performance support?