how to make online training more engaging

G’day Mates!

Welcome to The CoLab podcast. My name is Ryan Macpherson, CEO and Co-Founder of Coassemble, the online training platform revolutionizing how teams train. Today I’m joined by the Managing Director of Yarno, Lachy Gray. Today we’re going to talk about what Lachy sees in the future of online training, some current industry practices, and what role an online training platform has in onboarding remote employees. Let’s dive in, shall we?

About the CoLab Podcast

The CoLab Podcast is the best business training advice from experts in the field on sharing knowledge and growing teams successfully at scale. In each episode, host Ryan Macpherson will chat with guests about entrepreneurship, strategy, management, leadership, and the value of elevating the employee experience. Ryan will also share his insights on proven methods & strategies that helped teams grow.

To listen to the full episode, click the link below to hear CoLab wherever you enjoy podcasts most.

What you’ll learn in today’s episode

Many teams are learning how to share knowledge and grow effectively at scale. Though the topics and guests will be different, we’ll always be looking through that lens to create a powerful employee experience. In today’s episode, we’ll dive into:

• What are the challenges of starting online training?

• Why it's important to plan for learners

• How can you engage remote employees with online courses?

• And more!

Strap in, it’s gonna be a great episode!

Lachy and the start of Yarno

Lachy and his partner Mark began Yarno with a simple idea—how can you deliver effective training to distributed teams or remote employees? The goal was to create a solution to solve for teams in the digital space that weren’t delivering to expectations.

When Lachy and Mark started to figure out is that, often, training’s success came down to several metrics, and could look different for each company. But at the core of each training process is a single focus Lachy finds with any organization Yarno works with. Check out what it is and Ryan’s response below.

Lachy talks about how any company needs to begin their online training journey by understanding what result they’re expecting out of courses and how they will measure success or the ROI. The best way to think of this is to look at the four questions Lachy presents to every customer:

• What is your expected outcome for creating training?

• What does success look like and how will it be measured?

• What are the behaviors that you want to see learners change?

• What barriers are preventing learners from making those changes?

By understanding the answer to each of these questions, Lachy finds it’s often much easier to develop effective training. It also sets up successful measurement in a way that’s repeatable and ensures long-term success with a training process.

What is Lachy’s process for creating online courses?

Ryan talks about creating an online course can be difficult for companies if they don’t know where to start. Lachy offers a possible solution above by focusing on what behaviors they want to change with the training. If an organization can answer that, it can help guide their online training course creation.

Lachy offers an example of how this looks for Yarno’s customers in the transportation industry:

“...they've got semi-trailers, if the trailer drops off the back of the prime mover, it's called a drop trailer, and it actually happens fairly regularly. And it has a significant apart from the immediate safety risk, the reputational risk as well as for the customer. If they follow a particular process, that never happens.”

And that was how Lachy was able to pinpoint what behavior his customer wanted to change with their learners. By working with their team and subject matter experts, the team at Yarno created an online course that focused on best practices to prevent trailer drops. The online courses focus on questions that reinforce the best practices and the overall process to prevent trailer drops.

Then Lachy said they selected two teams—one that got the training and one that didn’t. After a few weeks, the results were definitive: that the team that participated in the training had reduced trailer drops.

But Lachy brings up an important point here that anyone creating online courses should consider: it’s difficult to attribute just the training to the result. What other factors played a role in the behavior change? Was it the repetition of good behaviors? The access to contextually relevant information that can be used in-the-flow of work?

Sometimes the biggest benefit of delivering the training is discovering the discrepancies between a standard or process and the reality of what’s happening. Lachy has seen learners and customers complain that an online course isn’t right, and this helps assess how to bridge the gap between what a best practice should be and what it actually is.

How do Ryan and Lachy approach learners

Shifting back to learners, Ryan brings up how a lot of organizations, especially mid to large-size tend to forget their audience. This can make delivering training difficult because often each group needs something different from a piece of training. Understanding the best way to deliver that information to learners based on their role, team, and department can shape how it’s given to them.

Lachy adds that, in addition to mapping out which behaviors a business wants to change for their learners, he also tries to understand who that learner is. If the content of an online course doesn’t benefit or resonate with that individual, then it’s already doomed to fail. He cautions trainers to try appealing to interest rather than reason. Because if the learner isn’t interested in participating in an online course, then the training process will never create the desired behavior change.

Building a learner profile can help with answering these instructional design questions:

• How are these learners being communicated with currently?

• What behaviors do these learners need to change?

• Where is the best point of delivery for training these learners?

• Is there a benefit to changing this behavior for them?

Ryan brings up a great example of a challenge these questions can illuminate for a training process—a communication breakdown.

Ryan’s example

Say you’re ordering on Uber eats. You punch in your location details, and a map pin so the driver knows where to deliver the food. The driver picks up the food, that tasty lunch you’ve been thinking about all day. And they’re excited to bring it to you because they’ll get paid for doing so. But after missed calls, parking in the wrong space, or missing an access code to your space, the delivery driver is unable to deliver.

This example probably sounds familiar to most of us, but how often do you think it happens in business? More than you’d think. The next example dives into that.

The same example in business

A SaaS firm is launching a new update their customers have asked for frequently. They’re excited to release it, and their customers are excited to benefit from it. As the update date draws near, the SaaS firm explains to customers how to download the new update in a short email. Customers try the process, but it doesn’t work for them. Customers begin to contact the firm's support, but support hasn’t learned how to respond to the issue yet. The SaaS company has an update they want to deliver to customers and customers want to use it. But that same breakdown in communication created friction that online training can identify and solve.

Lachy adds that most people just expect to purchase online course creation software and expect to get results—often that is rarely the case. By addressing change management in the early stages of an online training process, teams can set themselves up for success. Sometimes this is identifying who is the driving force behind the training, or the one disseminating the information. But creating this feedback loop is crucial to ensuring a prolonged and beneficial learning experience.

Ryan and Lachy share a common place to start creating online courses—think big, start small. You may have a library of online training courses you want to create, but it’s important to just create the first and nail that process down. Then, once you’ve ironed out the kinks for one piece of training with a small group, you can start disseminating more information to more learners.

The pivot to train online in 2020

2020 was a very different year than expected for anyone—and Lachy has a story to share on how Yarno adapted.

After the first shutdowns in early March, the team at Yarno had to transition to fully remote. They wanted to ensure they were able to pivot and still service their customers for the foreseeable future, from wherever they were.

Lachy and the team wanted to try and help their customers so they offered a lot of remote team transition courses for free. Since Yarno was so well positioned to provide support to employees new to working remotely, they knew they had to act.

Ryan asks if Lachy felt the market impact of teams scrambling for a solution and he shakes his head affirmatively. Lachy saw a shift in the perceptions of how businesses viewed eLearning and online courses, especially those now going remote for the first time.

What does Lachy see as the future for training with online courses?

Ryan mentions the concept of nudge theory— the utilization of information and challenges and testing to “nudge” someway in the right direction. Rather than dramatic shifts, nudge theory applies incremental growth that’s sustainable for learners and a training process. This has been proven to be more effective to change a behavior than forcing people to change a behavior.

Lachy agrees that this will be a driving force in learning sciences in the future. Lachy references famous business author Dan Pink, who often links autonomy, mastery, and purpose to behavioral changes.

By delivering quizzes that help learners understand the “why” and the consequences of a training, they feel more invested in working toward the result. Lachy adds that often, there’s an asymmetry of information where the high-level staff has a gap concerning context for end-user training.

Ryan agrees that baking the “why” into eLearning courses can dramatically improve the learner benefit. He’s seen thousands of online courses that are just a basic, five-step process that is plain and one-note. The problem with this format is that learners don’t see the value of learning in them and end up missing the point entirely. So by providing the foundational reasoning behind the training, learners see the bigger picture behind it.

We’ll close with some great words by Lachy for anyone wishing to start their online training process.

“I sometimes think that the most impactful learning happens when we don't realize we're learning. Because we don't have that label and we're just enjoying ourselves. And then, afterward, it's like, ‘Oh wow, that's something new, I've learned something new, that's really cool.’”

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The CoLab Podcast is a twice-monthly series that will include guests as well as Ryan providing expert knowledge on sharing knowledge, employee experience, and growing teams successfully at scale. To stay up to date, click subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts to receive the latest episodes.

Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.

You can also read a full transcript of the interview which has been lightly edited for clarity.