Knowledge in the Flow of Work: The Essential Complement to Training in the Hybrid Workplace

Inherent Training Challenges

“For nearly two years, companies have complained that they are caught in an unending cycle of hiring and training workers, only to see them leave in a matter of weeks or months. Constant recruiting and training drains management resources, and new hires often do not stick around long enough for that investment to pay off. Veteran employees are often asked to pick up the slack, leading to burnout.” (New York Times, January 3, 2023)

We couldn’t agree more. The training treadmill is also a financial drain for businesses. In fact, US companies spent $92.3B on it in 2021 alone and have very little to show for it. It will be futile for businesses to “throw more training” at the employee competency problem for the following reasons:

• Humans retain only 25% of new information they learn just after two days, according to the “forgetting curve” theory. In fact, research by the University of Waterloo found it to be a mere 2-3% after just 7 days!
• Today’s employees are millennials and Gen Z with short attention spans—12 and 8 seconds respectively (Source: Sparks and Honey). They would rather learn on the job than sit through training.
• It is hard to teach situational knowhow. An example is the ability of a customer contact center agent to diagnose and solve a customer problem or provide them advice, based on a specific symptom or situation.

Hybrid work adds to the challenge

Although companies have been attempting to get employees back to the office with mixed results, the hybrid work model is here to stay. For example, a recent survey of customer contact center agents, showed that 76% of agents are still working remote. Hybrid and remote work models make training even more challenging and employees are often orphaned with no next cube to walk to for answers if they need help. It also makes onboarding and shadowing difficult, creating a perfect storm to increase employee churn, which takes a toll on business performance.

The solution? Push the right contextual knowledge at the right time to employees in the flow of their work. This level of employee empowerment requires knowledge modernization. And you do with a knowledge hub.

The Knowledge Hub

Many enterprises think that they have knowledge in their organization. The problem is that so-called knowledge is often “legacy” or “faux knowledge,” large documents that employees have to read to get the answer to a customer query, or dumb keyword search, where employees have to contend with hundreds of “hits” to get to the answer, for example! Moreover, these knowledge assets are siloed, outdated, and inconsistent and employees stop using them.

Implemented as a hub, modern knowledge eliminates silos and becomes a single source of trusted knowledge. It goes beyond documents and search to include policies, procedures, compliance, and functional expertise (e.g., step-by-step guidance on how to resolve a customer problem or execute an account opening process, or recommend a health plan), served up in the context and flow of work—either on demand from employees or proactively.

Knowledge hub complements training

Many of our enterprise clients are already leveraging our knowledge hub to complement training, transforming the experiences of all stakeholders alike—customers, employees, business managers, and others. Here are some examples.

• Leading BPO armed its 8000 client services employees with the eGain Knowledge Hub? to handle millions of interactions from hundreds of its business clients, while cutting agent churn to half of the industry average.
• Health insurance company reduced employee training time by 33% and sustained agent performance even when 2000 of them had to go remote overnight when Covid hit. They also consolidated knowledge from 17 disparate systems into a single hub for consistent, knowledge-guided service.
• A mammoth federal government agency reduced case handling time by 25% and boosted their employee engagement score to 92% versus their industry benchmark of 67%.

Final word

Already an essential complement to training, the modern knowledge hub has become even more important in the era of hybrid work. Getting on the training treadmill the Times talked about has some health benefits, but you also need to get on the knowledge bandwagon to take your employee and business performance to the next level!

As published on Assotiation of Talent and Development blog

Author: Anand Subramaniam, SVP Global Marketing, eGain Corporation