Start With the Work, Not the Course: How to Close Workplace Performance Gaps
When the same mistakes, inconsistencies or performance gaps keep showing up, you know something needs to change.
Maybe room-ready standards are being missed. Staff are escalating routine guest situations they should be able to handle themselves. Or a safety or service procedure is being interpreted differently from one shift to the next.
Those problems already take time and resources: managers keep coaching around them; experienced employees step in to do more; work gets redone. And in some situations, the organization is carrying additional risk. Those costs may not show up as a separate line item, but the organization is already paying for the gap.
At WorkWise Design, we start with the work and look at where the learning system could better support performance.
Start by Looking at What Needs to Change
Before deciding you need a workshop, an online course or another training resource, look at the gap between what is happening now and what should be happening instead. And be specific.
For example, “employees need better customer service skills” is too broad to be useful. The real issue may be that employees are not sure how to respond when a guest asks for an exception to a standard policy. Or managers may be handling those situations differently, which leaves employees unclear about what they are expected to do.
Once the problem is more specific, you can look at what is getting in the way.
People may be missing information. They may need to practice making decisions that align with policy. They may lack a simple reference tool and instead have to rely too much on memory. Managers may be reinforcing the standard inconsistently after the initial training.
Workplace performance gaps are much easier to address once you understand what is contributing to them. From there, you can decide what will actually help close the gap.
Treat Your Learning System as Business Infrastructure
Sometimes the immediate gap can be addressed with one type of support. If people mainly need information they can refer to while they work, a job aid may be enough. If they understand the policy but struggle with judgement calls, they may need practice working through realistic situations. If managers are reinforcing the standard differently, the most useful support may be aimed at managers.
Even when one type of support is enough to address the immediate gap, it still sits within a broader learning system. That learning system helps people understand expectations, build capability, apply what they have learned, and keep performing consistently over time.
That learning system is part of the infrastructure of the business. It includes the training people receive, the resources they can access while they work, the way managers reinforce expectations, and the opportunities people have to practice and improve.
When those pieces are designed around the same performance expectations, even a small intervention can strengthen the larger system rather than becoming another disconnected training resource.
You Don’t Need to Know What to Build
You do not need to come to us with the problem fully diagnosed or the solution already mapped out.
You may simply know that onboarding takes too long, the same mistakes keep happening, managers are handling something inconsistently, or an existing training program is not producing the results you expected.
That is enough to start.
You may already have policies, procedures, old slide decks, notes from experienced employees, existing training, or other resources. We can help make sense of what is there, identify what is contributing to the concern, and work out what needs to change in the learning system.
From there, we can determine what should be improved, created or connected to better support the work.
Your Experts Provide the Context. We Do the Design.
To understand what is really contributing to a performance concern, we need input from the people who know the work.
No outside learning designer will know your organization as well as the people inside it. Your employees and subject experts understand the systems, the guests, the exceptions and the judgement calls. They know where the written process does not tell the whole story and what actually happens in practice.
That expertise needs to be part of the project. But it does not mean your subject experts should also be responsible for designing the learning.
What used to take me weeks or days now is reduced to hours to prep for a facilitation with a client. - Erin Ekman, President of Centrivity.
Too often, the person who knows the content ends up organizing it, deciding what should be included, writing activities, building materials and coordinating reviews on top of their regular job.
We use their time differently. They help us understand the work, clarify what is important, make decisions that only the organization can make, and review the key pieces. We take responsibility for turning that expertise into workshops, practice activities, job aids, and other parts of your learning system.
One of our leadership-development clients described the difference clearly. Preparation that had previously taken days or weeks was reduced to hours after we developed the program structure and supporting materials. She remained closely involved in the work without having to do all of the design herself.
Keep Collaboration Focused
Because we rely on your team's expertise, there will be points where we need to work something through together. A complicated process may be easier to talk through than explain in writing. We may want to brainstorm a realistic activity, clarify an exception, or get several people aligned on an important decision.
But that does not mean every stage of the project needs a meeting.
Once we have the information we need, we can do much of the development work independently. We use meetings when they will genuinely help us make progress, then use focused questions, reviews and feedback to keep the work moving asynchronously.
For one national e-learning provider, we began each project with a short alignment meeting, confirmed the learning outcomes, and then delivered the content in batches for review. The client requested minimal changes, and their internal developer was able to stay focused on other priorities while the courses moved forward.
Leave Room for the Project to Evolve
As we work through the project with your team, we usually learn more than anyone could have known at the beginning.
A subject expert may remember an important exception after seeing a draft. Two source documents may turn out not to agree. An activity may reveal another area people need to understand. Or seeing an early version may give the client a better idea for how the learning should work.
We had one client ask us to begin developing a course on one topic. About two weeks into the work, they decided that course was no longer the priority and asked us to move to something completely different.
We were able to change direction and keep working, without stopping to create a new proposal, re-price the project, or wait for another round of approvals.
That flexibility is one reason we use a monthly subscription for our custom work. Learning projects become clearer as they develop. The subscription model lets us respond to what we learn without treating every useful change as a scope problem.
We still estimate how many months we expect the project to require before we begin, so you have a reasonable sense of the overall investment. If something changes in a way that is likely to affect that estimate, we let you know.
Keep the Focus on Workplace Performance Gaps
All of this flexibility in how we design and manage the project is there for a reason: the learning still has to address the performance gap we started with.
The Calgary Stampede is a good example. They already had safety workshops, but those workshops were not creating the level of leadership accountability and behaviour change they wanted. We worked with their safety team to redesign the learning around realistic situations their leaders could encounter, supported by facilitator and participant resources their internal team could continue using.
Their Director of Employee Safety later reported that leaders had a much better understanding of their role as safety leaders and that safety performance was already improving.
We are already seeing changes in our Leaders. They have a much better understanding of their role as safety leaders. Our safety performance is already improving. - Bob McCullagh, Director of Employee Safety
Keeping the original performance gap visible throughout the project helps us judge the learning by more than whether the materials were completed. We can keep asking whether what we are building is actually helping people do the work differently.
Start With the Work
If something in your organization is not happening as consistently or effectively as it should, start there.
You may only know that front desk staff are handling guest complaints differently, new servers need too much help before they can manage a section on their own, or supervisors are applying the same service standard differently from shift to shift.
From there, we can look at what is contributing to the gap and where the learning system needs to provide better support.
The goal is to make it easier for people to do the work the way the organization needs it done.
If you have been trying to address a performance concern and are not sure what needs to change, talk to us. We can help you work through the problem and identify where your learning system can provide better support.
Have a performance gap you are trying to solve?
We can help you understand what is getting in the way and where your learning system needs to provide better support.
