This July (2016), Harvard Business Review released a post on how Design Thinking can be applied to professional training programs. The article clearly defined a path in which employees become the main focus for training program’s design.
Design Thinking is generally characterized as a method to help people understand and develop creative ways to solve problems and is usually solution-based. A representative Design Thinking process (by d.school at Stanford) often comprises of the following five stages: Empathize (understand users’ experience), Define (form a fundamental and unique concept/experience), Ideate (initiate ideas and possibilities to deliver such concept), Prototype (build trials), and Test (evaluate and re-design).
But what does Design Thinking have to do with new employees’ learning? It was found that after training, those new staffs usually leave the big corp or renown retail chains after the first two months. The problem became so popular that recent research of Bersin (of Deloitte) on global human capital showed an urgent need and high priority “for improved organizational learning”. Unfortunately, the solution was not simply to design a more fabulous training time, or to add more bonus paying during this period. It actually lies in the employee’s experience in absorbing the new information. In other words, we have to shift our focus to one of the five basic aspects in Design Thinking: our new employees (Empathize).
How? The article provided a clear pathway: to design a program that allows employees to learn everything they need in a prioritized order and gradually, rather than cramming everything disorganized in two weeks. It should provide people certain basic information before they officially go to work. When they already get the kick start, social connections, skills teaching sessions, and videos can be added gradually and in a slowly increasing amount.
In such an info-saturated era, such attention is really important as one of the reasons for the employees’ early leaving the companies is that they lose control of what they’re doing. While still in the two-week training period, they were flooded with information, but everything passed by so fast that most of them hardly retain anything after that. Then when they officially came to work, they knew very little of what they should, even though the knowledge was all embedded in training. Now, with the new direction, employees can absorb the information more slowly (somewhat equal their speed in colleges) and retain the skills and knowledge longer. Moreover, the companies can cut cost on their expensive training program by digitalizing it into something like an interactive app and at the same time, increase the employees’ positive awareness about training. In addition, such deed also promotes the continuous learning process as a keystone element in many firms.
https://hbr.org/2016/07/using-design-thinking-to-embed-learning-in-our-jobs
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