Gamification works. There’s simply no denying it. The evidence is all around us. Look in your wallet. Rifle past all the receipts and you’ll probably find a loyalty card for your local coffee shop. Check your wrist. Do you have a Fitbit or a Nike Fuel Band? Do you have an app on your phone that counts your steps? Have a think. Do you collect Air Miles? Game mechanics are all the rage. That’s not set to change any time soon. And yet, a large number of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) remain ungamified. This, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a devastating state of affairs. In some cases, you may not have the budget to introduce a Gamified LMS (or you may be locked into contract elsewhere). But fear not. This doesn’t mean that you are doomed to live a bleak ungamified existence. In fact, we’ve created the following list of tips to help you gamify your training (even if you don’t have a Gamified LMS, or some other slick new-age piece of technology, straight out of Blade Runner or Minority Report). 1. Adventurers, Assemble! If you plan properly, you can structure your training in a meaningful way. Indeed, if you theme the training from the get go, you’re more likely to produce the results you’re striving for. Don’t invite your learners to ‘Sales 101’. Invite them to a ‘Sales Boot Camp: where only the strong survive’. This sets the tone, drives expectation and helps motivate your team. If they go in believing that there’s something special about this training, they’re likely to be considerably more engaged and ready to learn. You should also shape the invite and the communications that go out to your delegates around your designated theme. Don’t be afraid to utilise your design team and any word wizards within your organisation. If you do it properly, you’ll help your delegates form an emotional attachment to your course that goes above and beyond the actual course materials. Think of it this way: you’re not sending your team to a compliance course in Milton Keynes, you’re setting them up for a learning adventure of epic proportions. 2. Collaborate to Compete! There are few more powerful motivational forces than competition. Competing against other people (whether they happen to be our best buddy, or our arch nemesis), tends to bring the best out of us. What would Tom be without Jerry? Why not draw on this impulse by creating a Learning Battle Royale? Let your learners embark on the 2015 Learning Hunger Games. To do this, you’ll need to divide your classroom into different teams. To help team-members feel a sense of ownership, you should ask them to name their team or even create their own team flag!  If each team knows the learning outcome(s) they are attempting to achieve, they’ll be motivated to work together to overcome any challenges that await them. 3. Badge Bonanza! Before you embark on a training experience, take the time to consider what’s important to your audience. What can you draw on to help engage them? Once you’ve established this, you can start creating badges or stickers that reflect this activity. For instance, if collaboration is an important element of your programme, you should create a ‘Collaboration’ badge and award it to the social butterflies within your group. But don’t stop there. Why not hand out badges throughout the day to those who ask the best questions, deliver the best presentations or those who perform well when called upon? 4. Leverage Leaderboards! are powerful motivators in and of themselves, but you can take things to the next level by introducing a leaderboard. At breaks throughout the day, you could ask team-members to add their badges to the board. The team with the most badges is the team who’s in the lead. Don’t forget to use this opportunity to comment on how the teams are doing and to encourage those poor souls who have fallen behind. 5. Learning Levels! The best learning experiences are those that never end. Don’t let your delegates think that their learning experience ends the moment they leave the classroom. You’ll need to make it clear that there will be further challenges available to their teams once the course is over. You could even set up a level structure, where new training content is made available once they reach a certain threshold of engagement during the course. 6. Challenge Your Champions! Your brightest and boldest learners may need extra pushing in order to get the most out of them. To achieve this, you could set up unique challenges with special rewards. For instance, you could ask team-leaders to create a case study on the transformative effect of your training content. If they do a good job, you could reward them with a badge, a gift voucher, or even a mention on the company intranet or social media profile. 7. Recognise & Reward! Turn your badges into this season’s must-have fashion accessory. No, we’re not talking about making them look like a vintage Dior brooch (though they should look pleasing to the eye). We’re talking about imbuing them with meaning so that your learners are willing to fight tooth-and-claw to earn them. A great way to build significance into these badges is to offer recognition to those who receive them. Why not invite your top badge collectors to lunch with your organisation’s CEO? After all, the importance of your learning is only as good as the impact it has and the recognition that your organisation gives to those who are utilising it. So, there you have it - Seven spectacular tips for using gamification within training scenarios, whether you happen to have a Gamified Learning Platform or not. Have you tried some of these out yourself? Do you have any more tips? Then please let me know on Twitter, @JulietteDenny!  The post Gamification in Action: SEVEN Seductive Ideas for Gamifying Your Classroom Training appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Just imagine for a moment that you could build a system so amazing that it has the power to get every single area of your organisation engaged. But that must just be a pipe dream, right? Wrong. This is something that can be done more easily than you think. And here’s today’s shocking plot twist: the solution lies in how you use your performance management system, of all things! Didn’t see that one coming, did you? (Or maybe you did, if you read the title of this article) Research shows that only 14% or organisations are happy with their performance management system, and if the organisation isn’t happy with it then there’s no chance the employees are. So how can such a system possibly become a universal engagement super-machine? Well it comes down to choosing a system with the right features and making sure you use them in the right way. Here’s how we use performance management to fire up the whole business: 1. Engage your leaders, and the rest shall follow! One of the trickiest parts of any business system implementation, whether it’s for learning or performance management, is in convincing managers and head office staff to get involved as well. Often they’ll expect their staff to make full use of the system, but might think they’re far too busy to jump in themselves. But if you encourage them to lead by example, it becomes much easier to get everyone else on board. So on our Performance Centre, we make managers dip in regularly to approve objectives and provide feedback, and to assign preparatory work for reviews. We also allow managers to award special praise badges to the employees who go the extra mile. This gives senior staff an extra reason to interact with the system, helping them to get more out of it. It’s a win-win for everyone! 2. Find your place in the universe (or business at least) One of the key enablers of employee engagement is in helping them to understand the part they play in the wider business. A study by ACAS found that employee engagement is closely related to working "for a successful organisation or one that is striving to be so, with a clear mission and purpose" and knowing "how what [they] do contributes to this". That’s why we built our Performance Centre to include departmental and organisational objectives, as well as individual ones. This allows individual employees to see how their objectives align with those of the business as a whole, and they can see in real-time exactly what impact their hard work is having on the organisation. All the team building exercises in the world would struggle to inspire such an indomitable company spirit! 3. Better together: Marry learning & performance management Finally, by properly integrating your learning and performance management systems, you can stand a much higher chance of boosting engagement across the board! After all, this is one of the key reasons we built the Performance Centre to fit nicely into our social, gamified Academy LMS. So when someone visits the platform for some learning they see the performance tools and take a look at them while they’re there, and vice versa. This helps boost engagement both ways. Also, if you’ve managed to get managers and head office involved, it means that they’ll get first-hand experience of your LMS, which they might not otherwise. This can be a fantastic way for them to see the value of your learning programmes and how they’re impacting performance. You never know, once they see all of the hard work being put in, they might even send some more resources you way! If you’re keen to check out our feature-packed Performance Centre in more detail, why not take a free tour?  The post 3 Proven Steps to Engage Your Entire Organisation Through Performance Management appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification. It’s a term you’ve probably heard before. Maybe you have a vague understanding of what it is. Maybe you don’t. Perhaps you’ve used it before. Perhaps you haven’t. Maybe the term makes you break out in hives. Maybe it makes you jump for joy (this is the correct response). Whatever the case may be, there’s a clear issue with the term. No two people seem to have the same working definition of what gamification is. It doesn’t help that there are two different kinds of gamification (‘Structural’ and ‘Content’). Then there’s ‘Learning Games’, which are their own beast, but often get dragged into conversations about gamification. Finally, there are those poor, misguided folk who use the term as a catch-all for anything tangentially connected to the gaming world. Argh! Why? There’s clearly an underlying sense of confusion about this word. If you run a quick search, you’ll find a startling lack of clarity on the topic. Bamboozlement abounds. As it happens, we’re about to throw our own beret into the mix. In fact, by the end of this article, we’ll have reached our very own definition of gamification. Hurrah! First, however, we need to establish our plan of attack. We’re going to start by picking apart somebody else’s definition like a pack of digital vultures. By doing this, we’ll be able to piece together the vital elements of any working definition of the term, before producing an alternative of our own. Back in the halcyon days of 2014, Gartner sought to redefine ‘gamification’. Here’s what they landed on: Gamification is ‘’the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals". This is an interesting definition. It covers structural gamification (‘game mechanics’) and content gamification (‘experience design’) and highlights the importance of engagement and driving motivation. And yet, this definition comes off as both a little too precise and a little too loose. Let’s break it down. Without further ado, here’s our three-pronged deconstruction. Digital or Analog? Interestingly, Gartner’s definition hones in on ‘digital’ engagement. But whilst digital experiences tend to be easier to gamify, they’re not the only types of experience that can be gamified. Think about the loyalty card you receive from your local coffee shop. There’s nothing particularly digital about a piece of paper and a stamp and yet this is clearly an example of gamification in action. What’s more, we often use gamification in classroom training, without using any digital applications as a crutch. Learners earn badges throughout the day and climb up our makeshift leaderboard. We even apply a level structure around our content. Can you really say that it’s not a gamified experience just because it’s not happening within a digital application? …Can you? Whose Goal is it Any Way? In Gartner’s definition, gamification focuses on enabling people to achieve ‘their’ goals. This begs the question: can you not gamify an experience to help people achieve your goals? Could you not create a gamified experience that encourages others to complete a survey you have created? They may not have woken up in the morning with a burning desire to complete a questionnaire, but the use of rewards could be enough to motivate them into action. Whilst we appreciate the importance of aligning individual and organisational goals, we don’t see how this impacts on the definition of gamification. This goes back to the ‘Is/Ought’ fallacy. Just because something ought to be, doesn’t mean it is (and vice versa). And it certainly doesn’t mean that it should be built into the description. Perhaps Gartner are trying to position gamification as a goal alignment tool. In other words, it’s something that can be used to bring people’s objectives and goals in line with your objectives and goals. In that sense it’s a sort of magical-motivation-reconfiguration machine. Still, even if this is true, it doesn’t feel accurate to classify a reconfigured goal as ‘their’ goal. The motivation has changed, but the author of the goal remains the same. Gameception: Can You Gamify a Game? Gamification can’t exist in a vacuum. Gamification is something that’s applied to something else. Yet in capturing this fact, Gartner’s definition seems to come up a little short. There’s no mention of where the game mechanics (or experience design) need to be applied, beyond the ‘digital’ qualifier. Does that mean that we could describe the gaming mechanics used within video games as an example of gamification? This seems nonsensical on the face of it, but Gartner’s definition doesn’t necessarily rule it out. As nit-picky as this all may sound, consensus is an important thing. If we’re all working from the same base definition, then we’re able to have better conversations and drive deeper understanding. So now that we’ve quibbled with Gartner’s definition on a near-atomic level, we’d better throw our lot in. We couldn’t let you go without providing our own definition, could we? "Gamification is the application of gaming mechanics to non-gaming contexts with the aim of inducing engagement and raising levels of motivation." There we are. This isn’t a definition that is going to blow anybody’s minds, or change anybody’s thinking on the topic, but it is one that adds a much needed sense of flexibility to the term, whilst still clearly communicating the inherent, obvious sense of what we mean when we say that an experience is ‘gamified’. Doesn’t that seem like a good starting point? What’s your take? Do you have a unique definition of ‘gamification’? Do you like our definition? Is Gartner’s definition worthy of re-evaluating? Let us know in the comment section below, or on our Twitter Handle!  The post Gamification Defined (& Re-defined): What On Earth Is It Anyway? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Did you ever watch TV with your grandma? If you have, there’s a good chance that you felt like some kind of alien. The murder mysteries your granny likes to watch have been created with old ladies in mind. If you’re not an old lady, you could find that a lot of it goes right over your head. You might even find that the constant gripes about ‘young people today’ frankly get on your nerves. That’s only natural - your gran probably wouldn’t like the same things you do. TV execs know that everybody is different and that’s why they take a different approach with every show they make. As an instructional designer, you need to know who you’re speaking to if you want your training to be a success. Why you need Learner Analysis Learner analysis or eLearning audience analysis is an important part of your training program. It gives you the context you need to communicate with your learners in a way that’s appropriate for them. Without this step, you could run the risk of insulting the learners’ intelligence or, worse still, assuming an expertise that’s far above their competencies. The first thing you need to consider is the goal of the training. What is it that your learners should be able to do after taking the training? Your learners’ needs will dictate the approach you need to take in order to reach this training goal. Much of the data you’ll need for your learner analysis will come from your training needs analysis. If you’ve been thorough, you’ll already know what training has worked in the past and how your audience reacted to it. What’s that? You haven’t analysed your training needs yet? Check out these two articles for some top tips! 5 steps to Training Needs Analysis heaven 5 more steps to Training Needs Analysis heaven Who are your learners? So, you’ve got a fairly good picture of previous training initiatives - now you need a good overall picture of who makes up your audience. What is the age of the average learner? Are they male or female? It’s also helpful to know their cultural and educational background as this will give you a good indication of their level of understanding. (Also, if you’re the kind of ID who likes to add humour to your courses, you’ll know which jokes are likely to fall flat!) How will they learn? The next thing you need to do is to step into your time machine, and travel forward to the point where your learners are taking the training. Are they likely to take an hour out to work through an in-depth unit? Maybe the nature of their job means that they’ll only be able to absorb bitesize units whenever they have a little spare time. You’ll also need to get a good idea of their level of technical expertise. If you’re delivering the learning content online, will they have the requisite IT-lore to access it and understand how it works? If not, you might consider including a brief tutorial at the beginning of the course that describes the basic functionality. How to find out more about your learners As you can see, there are a few things that you need to consider, but how are you going to find the information you need? If it’s possible, the most obvious (and probably most helpful) solution is to meet with the learners themselves and observe them at work. It’s also a good idea to have a chat with the relevant managers - they’ll have the best overview of the learners within their team. You could also try inviting the learners to an online survey. There are a few online services that’ll let you do this, but if you’ve got access to a really good online learning platform, it should have a survey functionality. Engagement is everything! The most important thing you need to remember is that engagement is everything. Without engagement, your training program will have precisely zero effect on your learners’ habits. If your learner analysis tells you that your learners won’t respond to a boring, click-through slideshow, then you’d be a fool to include one in your training. Instead, why not give them something they’ll enjoy? With Genie, you can create game-based eLearning units that turn your training content into a whole new kind of learning experience. ‘What do I need to do to get some of that game-based learning action?’ I hear your cry! All you need to do is click the link, pop in a couple of details and sign up for 30 days of game-based authoring hijinks! Happy building!  The post Learner Analysis - Know Your Audience! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Yes, you read that right! We’ve been recognised by Training Industry in their Top 20 Gamification Companies List, making us a certified world-leader! We could not be happier about this announcement! After all, gamification is something of a specialist subject for us. And the Top 20 aren’t ranked in any particular order, so for all we know, we could actually be number one (we like to think we are!). Of course, the reason we’ve made the list is our focus on building gamification features into our engaging learning products, namely our gamified, social Academy LMS and Genie, our game-based content authoring tool. Here’s what the judges were looking for: Features and capabilities of the gamification products/services Company size and growth potential Quality and number of clients/users Geographic reach Awards, recognition and competitive differentiation After dedicating more than a decade to transforming the world of online learning, our Managing Director, Juliette Denny, was almost brought to tears of joy when she heard we’d made the list! We calmed her down enough to grab a few words: "Making this list is a dream come true! More and more organisations are turning to gamification to engage their workforce with their learning and development, so being recognised as an industry leader is a huge testament to our hard work and expertise in this field!" We love sharing our gamification expertise, which is why we’ve put together two white papers, both absolutely free to download! First up is ‘Fun in Learning’ which explains what gamification is and how you can apply it to your learning. Second is ‘The Business Case for Gamification’ which delves deeper into the incredible ROI gamified learning can deliver to an organisation. And if you’d like to find out first-hand why we’re a world-leader when it comes to gamification, why not take a free tour of our Academy LMS to see what makes us stand out?  The post We’re one of the Top 20 Gamification companies in the world! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

We all love a good eLearning unit (unless you happen to be a heartless, unfeeling monster). But here’s the issue - it takes time (and buckets full of effort) to produce high quality online learning content. Instructional Designers are often driven mad by the sheer complexity, intricacy and difficulty of the projects they embark on. Awesomely effective, super-engaging eLearning doesn’t happen by itself - it takes a team of eLearning superheroes to make dreams a reality. But what if you don’t have a huge team? What if you’ve got a ton of eLearning units to produce for a new product launch in a month’s time? What are you going to do!? Well, I’m willing to bet that you’re going to Google something like "make eLearning quickly" and when you do that, you’ll probably find out about Rapid eLearning. ‘What is Rapid eLearning?’… …is likely to be the next thing you Google. And if you’re expecting a definite answer to this, you’ll be a little bit disappointed. There are several definitions of Rapid eLearning out there, but they usually tick the following boxes: Rapid eLearning is usually created within 2-3 weeks Rapid eLearning projects are usually handled by subject matter experts (SME) The process usually involves converting slideshows into SCORM-compliant eLearning Sounds like a dream-come-true, doesn’t it, but is Rapid eLearning a Holy Grail or a poisoned chalice? We’ve done a taste test for you, so let’s find out: THE PROS So, firstly let’s look at the advantages of Rapid eLearning. It’s rapid (duh)! Sometimes you just need the content. You could make it really pretty if you had… no - I just need it now. But with a little extra resource, you could… I don’t have time for that! That’s sometimes the reality of Learning and Development - sometimes you need to ditch the frills and just get some reportable content in front of the learners. In these cases, a Rapid eLearning solution lets you create a functioning eLearning unit out of your existing assets (Like a Power Point presentation, for example). It’s newbie-friendly! What good is a rapid authoring tool that takes a month to figure out how to use? Rapid eLearning should let you cut corners at every turn and the last thing you need is a steep learning curve appearing out of nowhere. The beauty of Rapid eLearning is that anybody can jump in and create a reasonably useful eLearning unit, without any coding background at all. It’s cost-effective! You’re saving time on eLearning production, and you no longer need to pay a team of eLearning developers - result! There’s no doubt about it - Rapid eLearning is cheap, cheap, cheap! If savings were the be-all and end-all of learning and development, then Rapid eLearning would be the only choice. Unfortunately, Rapid eLearning is not without its weaknesses… THE CONS Slideshow in - Slideshow out: You can save yourself a lot of time by converting a presentation document into an eLearning unit using a rapid authoring tool. The only problem with this (and it’s a pretty big one) is that your eLearning will now be about as engaging as this month’s P&L report. Generally speaking, the functionalities of Rapid eLearning are limited to basic interactions. Of course, at the beginning, your learners will think they’ve got an interesting new eLearning unit, but after the first half-dozen "Click here to continue" buttons, the novelty will have worn off. Worst case scenario, your learners will rise up in outrage and start a riot, but in all likelihood, they’ll just disengage their brains and click through to the end. That’ll leave your reports with 100% completion and 0% retention - in short, a waste of time. SMEs aren’t instructional designers: It takes a really special breed of learning-nerd to figure out how to hack people’s brains for maximum retention. Your product gurus might be the number 1 authority on your latest range of Wi-Fi -enabled shaving mirrors, but do they know the first thing about effective learning methodologies? It’s not super-likely, is it? The beauty of collaborative eLearning production is that it lets both IDs and SMEs use their respective talents to create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Without this kind of collaboration, you’ll have your eLearning in no time at all, but it might not be as effective as you’d hoped. SMEs aren’t graphic designers: Last week, Juliette, our MD, wrote this article on the importance of beauty in eLearning. She discovered that 45% of consumers will judge your content based on the aesthetics alone, and they’ll do this in just over 3 seconds. With enough time and resources, an eLearning team can produce learning assets that are as beautiful as they are effective. If you’re using a Rapid eLearning solution, however, the chances are you don’t have the luxury of time at your fingertips. Furthermore, if your SMEs don’t have the requisite eye for UI, you could find yourself with some informative, yet woefully ugly eLearning content. It would be a real shame to lose learner engagement on the grounds of something so shallow, but sadly, that’s the world we live in! So there it is - Rapid eLearning is indeed a useful tool when you’re up against it, but it’s not without its drawbacks. What you really need is something that lets you create eLearning units quickly, without being ugly or dull. You need some level of collaboration so that everyone can lend their own unique skills. And most of all, you need something that’s actually going to engage your learners. We’ve developed Genie, a content authoring tool that lets you produce engaging, game-based eLearning content quickly and without the need of a whole team of eLearning developers. You’re not just rattling out a bunch of slideshows-in-disguise - instead you’re crafting learning journeys that your learners won’t forget! Don’t just take our word for it though - take Genie on a test-drive today and bask in the wonder of game-based eLearning for yourself! Click here to become more awesome!  The post Rapid eLearning - Holy Grail or Poisoned Chalice? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

You know what it’s like, right? You’re walking around Sydney and you’ve got nothing fun to do! All you’ve got to entertain yourself is some weird spaceship in the harbour (they say it’s an ‘opera house’ but we all know the truth…).   Well, guys - don’t despair! Your mates at Growth Engineering are here to bring you the essential guide to having a bonzer time in Sydney! It’s not a big guide - it’s only got one event in it - but that’s all it needs, because this shindig is a real beaut!   The Learning@Work Conference and expo, 2015 kicks off on the 27th of October and spills over into the 28th. Growth Engineering, the ass-kickingest renegades of the online learning world, will be busting out the badges on stand #4. Don’t be a flamin’ gallah! Pop along and find out about what’s new and exciting in L&D and you (yes, YOU!) can pick up a badge of your very own! What’s that? You can’t make it to Sydney on time? Not to worry - you can satisfy your need for the latest and greatest learning tech right here, right now!  Click here to book a tour of our gamified social learning management system, the Academy LMS!  Or, if content creation is your bag, sign up for a free trial of Genie, our revolutionary new game-based content authoring tool!  The post Growth Engineering Down Under! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Hey talent management aficionados! This post is the first of a series of articles we’ll be producing over the coming weeks that focuses on the world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Imagine a world where you can enable your workforce to grow professionally, and can effectively guide them to reach their potential and deliver results for your organisation. This magical world is exactly what performance management is intended to engineer! It’s about keeping track of how each employee is performing, nurturing the talent already present within a business, and pinpointing areas for development. You’re like a gardener with a pack of seeds. You can scatter them in the soil and cross your fingers, or you can carefully manage the process, nurture them where possible and provide them with the nourishment they need to thrive. Soon enough, your talent will blossom into a truly effective force within your organisation. It’s good news for employees because they grow professionally, and it’s good news for employers because their staff are more productive and deliver better results! Performance appraisal systems Mention performance management to people and a lot of them will immediately think of appraisals. Appraisals are actually just one part of the process, namely the evaluation of performance, though of course this is crucial for discovering where improvement needs to be made. Many approaches are used to help measure performance. Here are just a few:   Objective management This is one of the most common ways to keep performance on track, and one that you’re probably familiar with! It involves an employee and their manager agreeing on targets, which should be completed within a certain timeframe. It’s intended to be an objective form of management, since it’s based on facts and results. A disgruntled employee can’t complain that their manager just doesn’t like them if it’s clear that they’re way off meeting their quota! Behavioural checklists This is where an employer will decide on a list of behaviours or skills they consider essential to a particular job role. This means that each specific role will have a checklist which is relevant to it. The manager will then rate each employee’s proficiency in each behaviour. This is a great way to flag up any clear gaps in their skill-sets, helping a manager to prioritise training and turn everyone into well-rounded performance powerhouses! 360-Degree feedback This takes the idea of two heads being better than one to its extreme. It’s where an employer will ask for reviews from an employee’s colleagues, managers, other departments they may work with, and potentially even their customers. The idea is to scrutinise someone from every possible angle, hence the 360-degrees. This can give you a much more rounded view of an employee and how they interact with other areas of the business.   There are countless other ways to approach appraisals, and an organisation will generally combine a number of them to get the best results. As they reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each individual employee, the organisation can then target their learning and development resources to maximise their impact! Why take performance management online? Though we’re well into the 21st Century now, a frankly staggering of organisations still handle their performance management offline. To put this into perspective, in 2014 the Employer’s Resource Council surveyed its members and found that just 30% use online performance management systems! But there are clear benefits to taking your performance management online, such as: Save time and money - Paper-based records take an enormous amount of time to put together, and as we all know, time is money! Once an online system is set up, it’s easy to manage, cutting down costs. Easier reporting - Have you ever tried to gather data from hundreds of paper records? It’s a nightmare, plain and simple. But online you can generate reports based on the performance of thousands of employees within seconds. Who wouldn’t want that? Full visibility for everyone - After a traditional appraisal, there can be a tendency to forget about everything until the next one. But with an online system as a constant record, everyone can keep focused on maximising their potential! Real-time information - Another problem with traditional appraisals is that they’re often infrequent, maybe even just once or twice a year. But an online system can be updated in real-time, meaning a manager can dip in regularly to see how their staff are getting on. Reach remote employees - In our hyper-connected world, lots of people work remotely, making it difficult to keep an eye on what they’re up to. An online system can be accessed from anywhere, meaning you can track the performance of someone anywhere on the planet! And this is before we even consider marrying up a performance management system with a learning management system! This brings an extra level of benefits, and makes it easy to deliver the perfect training content to maximise an employee’s development. Funnily enough, our Performance Centre does just that, as it’s fully integrated with our social, gamified Academy LMS! If you’d like to find out more about it, why not take a completely free tour?  The post Performance Centre Series: What is performance management? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bottomless budget and an army of eLearning cyborgs tirelessly developing content 24 hours a day. On the other hand, that’d be a bit too easy. There’s no thrill of the chase, no epic quest, no glory. But then again, you’re probably busy enough without turning your working day into an action extravaganza. Chances are you’re working with prohibitive funds and limited resources. Well, don’t throw in the towel just yet - there’s plenty you can do to stretch what you have to the max. You just need to be a little more creative. As the learning company that never stops giving, here are a few things to help you get the more with less when it comes to your training. Rapid eLearning So you want to deliver training material to your learners, but you’re lacking one small detail: an eLearning department. It’s not the end of the world - you don’t actually need an eLearning department! With a Rapid eLearning solution, you can turn your existing content into an effective eLearning unit. Instead of pushing documents and slideshows to your learners, you can incorporate these assets into a fully functional piece of eLearning. You can also add questions within the units to add an extra level of engagement Aside from being more engaging, these units have the added bonus of being reportable. In conjunction with a learning management system, you can have full visibility over who is completing the units which is essential if you want to gauge how effective they are. More effective eLearning The best White Paper you’ll download today! It’s one thing to combine your learning assets into an eLearning unit, but it’s quite another to ensure that your learners retain this information. The major challenge with online learning today is securing learner engagement. Even learners with the best intentions will lose concentration when faced with a boring eLearning unit. The way to get the best ROI from your eLearning is to give your learners something that they want to do. When you create something that’s more like a game than a piece of compliance training, you’ll trigger off a whole galaxy of natural reactions. They’ll want to beat the game, they’ll want to collect the prizes and they’ll do whatever it takes to get what they want! Check out our white paper on gamification to find out how to hack your learners’ brains and make them love learning again! Better Collaboration Let’s say you’re not a lone ranger, battling the odds on your own. Maybe you have a team at your disposal but somehow still end up fretting yourself into a tizzy with every approaching deadline. Sure, life would indeed be easier with a bigger crew at the helm, but until your next recruitment drive, you’re going to have to make do with what you’ve got. Ask yourself this - are you making the most of the team you have? In a lot of cases, the reason your deadlines seem so scary is that you’re just not working effectively enough. It just takes one silly miscommunication to throw a project off and give you another unexpected problem to fix. Guys, trust us on this: collaboration is the key to effective project management. You can’t afford to segment your team and isolate them in tiny cubicles away from each other. Give your team thorough visibility over the whole project, from start to finish, and they’ll have a greater sense of what their contribution means to its’ success. For more ways to boost collaboration in your eLearning development, check out these handy tips. User Generated Content Imagine if your learners created their own learning assets - wouldn’t that just save you a whole bunch of time? Let me introduce you to a little thing we like to call ‘informal learning’. ‘Formal learning’ covers all of the material you create for your learners to consume and it makes up only 10% of everything they learn at work. This gives the learners a good foundation but what about the other 90%? This they’ll pick up from actually doing their jobs and (here’s the important part) interacting with their colleagues. You see, there’s knowledge flying around in your workplace right now! It’s everywhere you turn - you just need to find a way to harness it. If you’ll excuse the shameless plug for a moment, our Academy LMS is designed to do just that. We’ve included ‘insight groups’ which are like virtual water coolers where your learners can congregate and discuss the nerdy minutiae of their jobs. When you give your learners a platform (real or virtual) to discuss the things that matter to them, it’s like planting a seed in the ground. Over time this seed grows into a huge repository of information that should be accessible to everyone. Not only that, you’ll be able to identify experts within your company - and what are experts..? Why they’re honorary members of the L&D team that can do your job for you! So the next time you find yourself on your own in a bathroom cubicle, silently crying to yourself in desperation - just take a deep breath, look at what you have, and figure out how to get the most out of it. Tantalised at the thought of effective eLearning that engages your learners? Why not give Genie a go? Our game-based authoring tool is completely collaborative and lets your whole team come together to craft awesome learning journeys that your learners will love! Start your free trial today by visiting unleashthegenie.com.  The post 4 Creative Ways to Get the Most from your eLearning Content appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Calling all talent management lovers! This is the second part of our series on the wonderful world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Pop your head inside any organisation and you’re likely to overhear managers talking about objectives and KPIs. Also coming under the broader umbrella terms of ‘goals’ or ‘targets’, they’re intended to keep every employee more focused on their tasks than a cat on a laser pointer. For decades it was thought that a Harvard study had found that people who write down their objectives can be up to 10x more successful than those who don’t! In reality, it turned out that this study never actually happened (whoops!). Thankfully, a real study by Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that committing to written goals and regularly updating your progress towards them really does let you accomplish a lot more. Objectives and KPIs Before we go any further, let’s just make sure we’re crystal clear on exactly what we’re talking about! Objectives are your overarching goals, the big things you need to achieve. So an objective for a salesperson would likely involve increasing sales revenue by a certain amount. KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. These are the individual tasks which need to be completed in order to reach your general objective. So to return to our salesperson, they won’t be able to increase sales revenue without making a certain number of prospecting calls, or by upselling a certain number of new products to existing customers. Let’s look at an example: Objective - Decrease employee turnover rate by 25% over the next quarter. KPI1 - Increase training hours per annum/per employee by 15% KPI2 - Increase number of employees who can articulate organisational values to 75% KPI3 - Reduce time to respond to an internal complaint to 48 hours Of course, it’s useful to set objectives and KPIs for every individual, so that they have a clear idea of exactly what they should be working towards. But don’t neglect departments, or even the organisation as a whole! Setting objectives for these shows which direction the team should be heading towards, and gives everyone visibility of how their work is making an impact. Think SMART Notice anything about the wording of the objectives and KPIs in our examples above? You’re very clever if you do, because they were all written to be SMART! This little acronym is one to remember, as it will make sure that any objectives you set will actually be useful. So they need to be: Specific - Make them clear and unambiguous Measurable - Make sure you can track your progress, and put a number on your success Achievable - They should stretch you, but they won’t be out of reach Realistic - You’ll have the resources and the skills to get them done Time bound - You’ll have a deadline to get them done by So let’s look at the example from before - Decrease employee turnover rate by 25% over the next quarter This is specific because it focuses on employee turnover. It’s measurable because this is something which can be tracked. It’s achievable because it will require hard work, but it’s not out of reach. It’s realistic because you already have the plans in place. It’s time bound because it needs to be completed over the next quarter. SMART goals turn everyone into well-oiled task-completing machines, incapable of leaving a job half-done! So how do we do it? We’re glad you asked! With our robust Performance Centre, we’re taking performance management online! And what performance management tool would be complete without an Objectives and KPIs section? Using our system, an employee can set their own individual objectives and KPIs. If they’re not up to scratch, their manager can send them back with a comment attached, to make sure that only useful targets are being set! The employees then update their progress as they go along, so a manager can dip in whenever they want and get a real-time assessment of how their staff are getting on. You can also keep track of departmental and organisational objectives. These are visible to everyone so that they can see how their own Objectives alight with those of the business. There’s even a swanky dashboard so that everyone can keep an eye on their progress at a glance. Keen to find out more about our Performance Centre? Why not take a free tour today?  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Objectives and KPIs? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Just when you think the awards season is dying down, yet another announcement rekindles the fire. This time we’ve found out that we’ve made the finals of the informatively named Learning Awards! We’re in the running for the coveted ‘Learning Provider of the Year’ title. Of course, we’ve earned our place in the finals for our gamified, social Learning Management System - The Academy LMS - and our game-based content authoring tool - Genie. And let’s not forget the close partnerships we build with every one of our clients, as well as the return on investment we help them deliver, which were critical factors in making the shortlist! ‘But what are The Learning Awards?’ Well, they’re hosted by The Learning and Performance Institute, the UK’s leading institute for workplace learning professionals. They’re intended to recognise outstanding examples of high standards, best practice, innovation and excellence in Learning and Development. This year saw more than 300 entries, more than ever before! In our ‘Learning Provider of the Year’ category, the submissions were whittled down until just six organisations remained as finalists. Colin Steed, LPI Chief Executive, had some nice words to say: "With such a large number of entries the competition is fierce, making the achievement of our shortlisted entries all the more impressive. The 2016 Learning Awards is shaping up to be a hotly-contested event - just to make the finals is a tremendous achievement for which the organisations and the individuals should be truly proud." Our Managing Director, Juliette Denny, is on the other side of the planet giving a presentation in Australia, but we could hear her celebrating from here in Windsor! Here’s what she had to say: "This news is simply staggering! To be one of just six organisations to make the final cut is a real honour! We’re going to be bringing our A-game to the judges to show them exactly what we’re all about!" So what next? We’ll be heading to London Town on November 18 to impress the judges in person, then on February 4 we’ll be heading to a swanky awards ceremony at The Dorchester. We can’t wait! Fancy finding out just why we keep winning awards? Take a free tour of our Academy LMS today and see our unique approach to learning first-hand!  The post We’ve made the 2016 Learning Awards finals! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

You’re a turbo-charged, unstoppable eLearning professional, so you don’t need us to tell you how to choose the right questions to ask your learners. If you’re an instructional designer who’s putting a storyboard together, you already know what the learning objective is. You know what knowledge your learners need to have and, most of all, you know which questions will be effective and which ones won’t. We can’t help you be more awesome than you already are… …or can we? Genie is our game-based authoring tool that lets instructional design superstars like you create eLearning that knocks your learners’ socks off. Today, we’re going to look at how Genie can help you make the most out of your questions and go a step beyond the typical, average, every-day authoring tools out there. Question Types Let’s be fair - you’d get a little bored if you were doing the same thing for too long. The same is true for eLearning questions. After the first few ‘true-or-false’ questions, learners tend to get bored and lose their concentration. As a conductor of the Philharmonic eLearning Orchestra , you need to mix things up a little and give your learners a bit of variety. With Genie, you can add: Multiple Choice Questions This firm favourite of instructional design gives the learner a few options and lets them choose the right one. Of course, not everything is black-and-white, so you can assign more than one correct answer to cover that grey area. Text Entry Questions When you take away all of the options, the question becomes a lot more difficult. If you want your learners to really work for it, this question type will ensure that they have a challenge worthy of a true learning superstar! Discovery Method Questions Genie also features our own introspective learning methodology - the Discovery Method. In this question type, there is no right or wrong answer. The learner is asked to examine their own experience and to apply it to the lesson at hand. This sends them on a more personalised learning journey that’s ultimately more rewarding! FEEDBACK So, what happens once your learners have answered your well thought-out questions? Assets pushed on incorrect answer Incorrect answer feedback When a learner gets a question wrong, you could just prevent them from getting full marks at the end of the unit - but you’re missing an opportunity to address their knowledge gap at the appropriate time. With Genie, you can provide a simple text output for incorrect answers, but you can also push them a relevant learning asset that deals specifically with the topic in question. In so doing, you can nip any issues in the bud before they become bad habits! Correct answer feedback As with the incorrect answer feedback, the positive feedback lets you enter a short congratulatory message. You can expand on this even further and explain why the given answer was correct or, you can go off-piste completely and reward the learner with a fun fact! Badges are another form of positive feedback unique to Genie. Genie’s badges can be triggered by various actions within the eLearning (like opening or closing a slide, etc), but awarding them for correct answers is by far the most useful and relevant application. The learners have full visibility over their badge cabinet which adds an extra will to succeed. They’ll try even harder to answer all of the questions correctly, just so they don’t end up with an embarrassing gap in their trophy cabinet where a badge should be! So, as you can see, Genie offers a great range of applications when it comes to testing your learners. But a fine selection of questioning options is just the start of it - Genie also lets you turn every unit into a game! Want to check it out for yourself? Pop over to unleashthegenie.com and take it for a free test drive!  The post eLearning Questions in Genie - Overview appeared first on Growth Engineering.

After finding out on Monday that we’ve made the finals of the Learning Awards, we mentioned that the Awards fire had been rekindled. Well it seems we were right because we’ve now found out that we’ve also made the finals of BESMA 2016 for the ‘Training Centre of the Year’ category! We’re almost at celebration overload here in the office! But what exactly is BESMA? It actually stands for British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Awards, and they’re organised by another acronym - the ISMM (that’s the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management). The idea behind the awards is to reward the efforts of the individuals and teams that drive company performance and to recognise the roles sales professionals play in driving the UK economy forward. So why did we get shortlisted? It’s thanks to our library of fully online ISMM-accredited sales and marketing training content. We developed it to meet the ISMM’s strict standards, and of course we deliver it all through our gamified, social Academy LMS! We even used our unique Discovery Method to build the content to be as engaging as possible! We license this sales training to our Academy LMS clients. But we want to share it with the whole world, so we offer it to everyone through our beloved sister site - Sales Superstars. More than 1,000 salespeople have now engaged with our sales training, including 250 on the other side of the planet, in Australia! If you fancy finding out about the incredible ROI it’s helping our clients to deliver, why not check out our case studies of Aggregate Industries, Holcim Australia or Tech Data Corporation? Our Managing Director, Juliette Denny, is absolutely chuffed: "Hearing this news was an absolute joy! We’ve provided one of the biggest ever roll-outs of quality ISMM-accredited sales training thanks to our 100% online approach, so it’s fantastic to get some recognition. Now we just have to prove to the judges that we deserve to win!" Our next step will be telling the judges just how good we are, then on March 9 we’ll be off for a delightful awards ceremony at Grosvenor House Hotel in London! Want to know why we just can’t stop winning awards? Take a free tour of our Academy LMS today!  The post We’re finalists at BESMA 2016! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Greetings performance management lovers! This is the third part of our series on the fascinating world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Think about any job role and try to imagine the perfect employee. Chances are you’re not trying to picture what they look like, or what they’re called, or what their favourite era of David Bowie is. Instead, you’ll be thinking about the ideal skills and behaviours they’re going to be bringing to the table - their competencies! When we looked at objectives and KPIs, we were looking at ways to measure attainment, or what an employee has achieved. When looking at competencies, we’re tracking how they achieved what they did. Of course, the types of competencies an employee needs depend entirely on their role. So a developer might need to be competent at Java and PHP, whereas a salesperson is more likely to need good communication and research skills. The case for competencies A 2006 study by Bersin & Associates found that a whopping 86% of HR managers find competency management to be either important or critical to performance management success. Despite this, the same study also found that 45% feel that important competencies are either spotty or non-existent in their organisation! Tracking competencies can be a powerful way to manage performance. It lets you pinpoint an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, so that you can focus training and development efforts on the weaker areas. But there are also other benefits. For example, it’s a great way to make clear exactly what is expected from a job role. So you can be sure that Gary in Accounts definitely knows that he needs to have a decent grasp of finance! It’s also useful for the employer, as it gives them the opportunity to think carefully about exactly what they want from someone in this role. Taking the time to map this out will help future recruitment efforts, as the employer can make sure to only bring in people with the right competencies, or with the potential to develop them. So how do we do it? Our robust Performance Centre has taken the world of performance management online! The dedicated competencies area is designed to let employees and managers keep track of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, so that they can target their development to the areas which need more work. At the top is the employee’s job description, which is there to remind them of their responsibilities and what accomplishments they should be working towards. Then the different competencies this role requires are laid out clearly in front of them. If they want to read more about exactly what is meant by each one, they simply click the help button. To make things as user-friendly as possible, each competency is followed by three colourful sliders. The first slider lets and employee self-assess their ability in that area, from ‘foundation’ to ‘exemplary’. The second bar is used by their manager to give their own assessment of that individual’s ability, and they can attach comments to explain any disagreements. The final bar is the target level, which someone in that job role should be reaching. Keeping an eye on this page is an easy way for an employee to make sure they’re focusing their efforts into building up their weaker areas, making them a much stronger asset for the company! You can’t complain about that! Fancy taking a first-hand peek at everything our Performance Centre can do? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Competencies? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Online Learning can be a bit like a slasher flick sometimes. The day can start out innocently enough, but before you know it, you’re hiding in a stationery cupboard, too afraid to open the door for fear of the zombie learners outside trying to eat your brain. As it’s the time of the year for horrifying hijinks, we invite you to switch off the lights, flick on a torch and gather around the TV for a monster movie marathon. This isn’t just for the fun of it, mind you - the world of horror movies contains a great deal of wisdom that you can use to save your online learning from a fate worse than death! 1. You can run… but you can’t hide Remember that nightmare you had where Freddy Krueger was chasing you with his scary knife-glove? Wasn’t it strange that no matter how fast you ran, he was always right there behind you getting ready to do something unspeakable. The thing with movie monsters like Ol’ Fred is that they are sustained by fear. The only way to defeat them is to stop running, turn around and face them head-on. It’s the same for your training programme. If your efforts aren’t having the desired results, ignoring the problem will only allow it to grow into an even more insurmountable beast. So, no matter how ugly and terrifying the reality is, the only answer is to roll up your sleeves and prepare to deal with it. 2. Kill it - TWICE! You’ve all seen it. The movie’s almost over, the monster lies motionless on the floor but just as the protagonist is breathing a sigh of relief, a gnarled claw springs up and takes a final swipe. It happened with Michael Myers in Halloween, and with Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th - it even happened at the end of the first Terminator movie. The killer-comes-back-to-life-for-one-last-scare cliché is such a popular trope that it almost ceases to surprise. The lesson here is that complacency leads to certain doom. It’s too easy to assume that your training has had the desired effect after a single week’s positive results. Unless you stay on your guard and monitor your learners’ progress, you’ll run the risk of the same old horrors returning to haunt you. 3. Kids know everything If you watch Poltergeist or the Sixth Sense, you’ll come face-to-face with the creepy child who seems to be wise beyond their years. This crops up again and again in horror movies. From the very beginning the child speaks of ‘the little girl in the basement’ or ‘the scary old lady who won’t let me sleep’ but the adults shrug this off as the product of an over-active imagination. Of course, by the time they realise that the child was right all along, it’s too late and Robbie’s being attacked by his braces in the bathroom. ‘What’s this teaching me about online learning?’ you ask. Well, if you look at your learning program through the eyes of a child, the first thing you’ll probably realise is that it’s just plain boring! There’s a little kid inside all of us and your learners are no different. They want to be entertained as much as they want to gain the skills they need to succeed in their careers. If you produce dull online learning, that inner child will just throw a tantrum and your training will have no effect at all. 4. Don’t leave the group "I’ll be right back…" These ominous words are soon followed by a blood-curdling scream (See also: "We should split up and investigate this abandoned abattoir separately"). Without a doubt, you’ve found yourself shouting at the TV and calling the characters all kinds of unflattering names - because the fact of the matter is that THIS IS THE MOST STUPID IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF STUPID IDEAS!!! Never split up, never break from the group, never go off on your own, because you will be gutted like a fish and hung from a tree. Learning on your own might not have such grizzly results, but there’s always strength in numbers. If you want your training program to be a success (and why wouldn’t you!?), you should unleash the power of social learning. 5. Don’t take shortcuts It doesn’t matter how late it’s getting, or how desperate you are to get to the prom on time, the worst idea you can have is to take a short cut down that unlit country trail. Want to know why? Well, if you do decide to cut a little bit off of your journey, you’ll no-doubt stumble across a family of murderous shut-ins, hell-bent on cutting a little bit off of your head. Stay on the road, for heaven’s sake! The movie might not be quite so exciting, but at least you’ll be alive and in one piece! Similarly, there’s no quick route to online learning success. Don’t be tempted to throw an eLearning unit together in the hope that ‘it’ll do’, because unless you put some thought and passion into it, it won’t do. There you go, folks - our spooktacular guide to avoiding online learning horrors! We hope you take note of these cautionary tales and survive every L&D shock and fright that comes your way… at least until the sequel! Looking for ways to engage your learners and bring your online learning back to life (not in a Frankenstein way)? Download our White Paper!  The post 5 things Horror movies can teach you about online learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

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Welcome performance management fanatics! This is the fourth part of our series on the amazing world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! A company is a living, breathing organism, made up of dozens, hundreds, often thousands of employees! But with so many people driving the organisation, how can you ensure that all of them want to steer it in the same direction? When we talk about values and principles, we mean the corporate values which define your company. They’re your organisation’s mission statement, they tell your staff and the rest of the world exactly who you are and what you stand for. Including values and principles as a key part of your performance management efforts is a great way to make sure that every employee understands your company and shares its philosophy. Why bother with values and principles? Back in 1992, Professors John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett published a ground-breaking study in their book Corporate Culture and Performance. They looked at the corporate cultures of 200 companies, and tracked their economic performances across an 11-year period. Their findings were simply staggering! For example, when comparing companies with strong company values to those without, they found that their revenue grew an average of 682% compared to just 166% over the 11 years. Net income grew an incredible 756% compared to a measly 1% for the companies lacking strong corporate culture! So spending the time and effort to clearly define your core values can bring real financial benefits! They drive the people within your business, turning every one into perfect representatives for you. They even help you when bringing new people on board, as you can make sure you only recruit people who share your vision and will fit perfectly into your organisation. So how do we do it? With our online Performance Centre, we’ve carved out a dedicated area for managing Values and Principles. And as you might expect from a company which has made its name through a gamified learning management system, we’ve added gamification functionality to performance management too! Any employee can come to this section to remind themselves of the different values which define their company and its workforce. But they’re also incentivised to demonstrate these values in the workplace. How is this done? Badges! Each time an employee becomes a paragon of a certain company value, they could be eligible to earn a badge for it. But there’s a catch… These badges can only be awarded by someone else! This means that each demonstration of a value has to be verified by a colleague. It also helps to foster a sense of team spirit, as you have everyone working towards meeting the values, and keeping an eye out for opportunities to reward their colleagues. Each badge has an accompanying comment to explain exactly why it was earned. You can even set a target number of badges to earn within a set period. So, for example, you can task employees with earning three of each type of badge between each review. This is sure to get everyone living and breathing your values and principles! Want to see more of what our Performance Centre can do? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Values and Principles? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Did you know that the original Popeye got his strength from rubbing a magic hen? Is that important to your training programme? Probably not, but I’ll bet you’re still glad you found that out! As leaders in gamified online learning, we’ve explored every avenue to find ways to keep learners’ attention and make the learning experience something that they want to do. We’ve had huge success in applying game mechanics like rewards and badges. A lot of people might consider these virtual accolades as ‘trivial’ but we’ve seen at first-hand what power these silly little trifles have! In fact, one of our clients reported a 24.7% increase in sales knowledge after implementing game mechanics like these on their Academy. The word ‘trivia’ by definition concerns details or pieces of information that have little importance or value. That doesn’t make it useless. Actually, you can leverage basic human curiosity by engaging your learners with facts. FACTS: The thinking-man’s jokes If you want to break the ice at a party and make everybody like you, there are a few ways to approach it. You could tell a long-winded anecdote or summarise the plot of that movie you watched last night, but you’ll probably lose your audience mid-way through. It’s often better to open with a quick one-liner, something to spark the conversation off. People like facts for this very reason. Facts are short and easy to remember and, if used correctly, can make you look like a genius! Your learners like facts and you’re always looking for ways to engage your learners… so why not bring these two truths together? How to use facts in online learning: If you want to use facts to improve the learning experience, just think of them as rewards. However your learning material is delivered, at some point you’ll have to generate feedback for each task. If you’re an instructional designer, you’ll be familiar with the problem of question feedback. Incorrect-answer feedback is simple enough - if they get a question wrong, your feedback should point the learner in the right direction, but what if they get the question right? There are only so many ways that you can say ‘Well done’. And you might not be fortunate enough to have a badge/reward system enabled within your learning portal. Instead, reward them with a fascinating piece of trivia! Keep a list You’ll run into interesting facts everywhere you go - you just have to keep your eye out for them. When you do come across something that gives you a ‘well I never’ moment, jot it down in a notebook, take a snap on your phone or just favourite that random tweet. Once you’ve built a nice repository of facts, you can dip in whenever you need to and share that sense of discovery with your learners. If you’re not sure where to start on your quest for tiny knowledge-nuggets, here are a few handy links to get your trivia juices flowing! Kickass Facts: From history to popular culture, you’ll find all sorts of facts here - all of them linked conveniently to their sources, just in case you’re the suspicious type! QI Elves on Twitter: This is the official Twitter account for the researchers of QI, that awesome land where facts just grow on trees. Answer Me This!: In this podcast, listeners email in their questions and our two presenters, Helen and Olly, attempt to answer them, unearthing a trove of trivia in the process! XKCD - What If?: This philosophical web comic by Randall Monroe also addresses questions from the audience. You may need to trawl a little for a short fact, but you’ll enjoy every second of it! Of course, with a fully gamified online learning solution, you can engage your learners in a whole galaxy of different ways. If you want to find out what gamification can do for your ROI, check out our white paper!    The post Reward your Learners with Facts and Trivia appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Hello, performance management buffs! This is the fifth part of our series on the remarkable world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Reviews… Appraisals… Just mentioning these words can be enough to send chills down many people’s spines. Performance reviews are a staple part of just about any organisation you’re likely to come across. They’re often restricted to annual affairs, but sometimes they can pop up multiple times a year. Generally they give you a chance to look back over how well an employee has been meeting their objectives and KPIs. The actual review usually takes the form of a one-to-one interview, which is used to give feedback on performance, address any issues, and discuss future targets, among other things. You’re probably familiar with the process. But some studies show that as many as 98% of staff find reviews unnecessary! The problem with performance reviews So what exactly is so bad about performance reviews? Well, research conducted by YouGov for Investors in People suggests that a lack of visibility may be a key part of the issue. The study found that one in five employees (19%) are convinced that their manager doesn’t even think about the appraisal until they’re in the room doing it. Even more employees (23%) believe that their manager sees the review as little more than a ‘tick-box’ exercise! If the employee believes that their manager isn’t taking the review seriously, then it’s hardly going to inspire anything in them. That’s why it’s important to disrobe the review process as much as possible, to leave nothing to the imagination! A manager needs to make it clear that they’re putting effort into planning the appraisal, and should involve the employee in this if possible. They also need to prove that the review will actually result in action being taken. This is the key to making reviews useful and productive! So how do we do it? Through our online Performance Centre, organising and preparing for reviews couldn’t be simpler! Ahead of a meeting, a manager will set questions for the employee to answer. When the employee logs into the platform to answer them, they’re shown their current progress towards their objectives and KPIS, helping to guide their preparatory thinking. The manager can even leave comments on their answers, making sure they’re planning properly for the appraisal. This gives full visibility to the preparation, and shows that the manager is thinking carefully about the review and what they want to get out of it. Following the meeting, the manager heads back into the Performance Centre, and this is where the magic happens! The Performance Centre is fully integrated with our multi-award winning Academy LMS, meaning that learning and performance management can be handled from the same place. So after the review, a manager can use simply choose the perfect learning content to solve any issues raised during the meeting, and have it automatically pushed to the employee. This helps them focus their training efforts on the areas which will give them the most gain for their time investment. The recommended materials also get nicely organised into an Individual Development Plan (more on that next time!) Finally, a huge one-up compared to traditional paper-based reviews. Rather than having to hold on to hundreds of documents, every review is stored neatly on the Performance Centre. So you can review your reviews whenever you want! You can’t ask for more visibility than that! Want to try our Performance Centre first-hand? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Reviews? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Imagine what your eLearning would look like without any awesome images! Can you picture a piece of learning collateral with no video or audio to keep it interesting? It’s undoubtedly possible to make a text-based eLearning unit without any assets at all, but it’s going to need to be pretty magical to hold your learners attention. Well, luckily we don’t live in that upside-down asset-free wasteland - this is the 21st century and there’s an invisible cloud all around us filled with all of the assets you could ever need. What are assets? In terms of your eLearning, assets refer to the images, videos and audio clips that build up each screen. This covers everything from the voice-over to the photos representing characters in your scenario screens. Why do they need to be organised? Choosing assets for your eLearning isn’t just some wacky free-for-all. As an instructional designer, the first thing you’ll be considering is whether the asset you’ve chosen supports the learning objective. But the instructional designer isn’t the only person involved in an eLearning project. The company in question is going to be pretty keen to make sure that the assets reflect the brand and their overall mission. Since few companies sit still for very long, the chances are that your assets will need to be occasionally updated. Without a good system in place to help you keep everything where it should be, you’ll run the risk of creating an eLearning unit that’s full of contradictions and inconsistencies. ASSETS IN GENIE So how does our game-based authoring tool serve your asset needs? Genie currently supports the following asset types: Images You can easily upload images in a variety of file types like jpgs and pngs and we’re even working on enabling animated gifs! Video At the time of writing, Genie currently supports MP4 video files. By default, once a video is included in a unit, the learner will need to finish watching it before they can progress any further, ensuring that they don’t accidentally skip past some vital message. Audio You can add audio clips to your eLearning by uploading MP3 files. To keep everything as user-friendly as possible, the process for adding images, video and audio files is exactly the same - it’s just a matter of selecting an empty space and choosing whichever asset you want. ASSET LIBRARIES Asset libraries help you keep everything super-organised to make sure you don’t lose anything and you avoid committing any branding-crimes. It’s easy to create an asset library and you can assign as many libraries as you’d like to each project. For example, you could create a default library that contains assets that are universal to all of your eLearning units, and create individual libraries with specific assets for each. This saves a lot of time when it comes to creating new projects as you’ve already got the basic framework ready to go. Assigning/Reassigning Assets If you ever need to switch an image, video or audio clip out of a library and into another, it’s a simple process of selecting it, choosing another library from the drop-down menu and hitting the reassign button. Permissions Nobody likes to return to a project to find that someone else has been there and moved things around. You needn’t worry with Genie - every user is assigned a role that’s custom-built depending on the permissions you want them to have. These roles are fully customisable letting you decide who can edit libraries and who can’t. So there it is - Genie’s asset management functionalities! Bear in mind that our authoring tool is changing all of the time and we’ve got a development roadmap full of new and interesting asset functionalities. If you want to give it a spin for yourself, and stay informed about Genie’s new features, just sign up for your free 30-day demo!  The post Asset Management in Genie - Overview appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Having spent the past decade crusading against dull online learning, we’ve recently entered the ring to go toe-to-toe with dreary performance management as well. Our fully online Performance Centre makes the whole performance management process as user-friendly as possible. And, with everything online, performance can be managed remotely at any time during the year, and there’s no need to try to organise thousands of paper documents. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s fully integrated with our gamified, social Academy LMS! This means that it’s easy to tailor training and development programmes to meet an individual’s performance shortfalls. So it’s the perfect partner for anyone involved in performance management. Just ask Pedro, the star of the video below! Pedro is an HR Manager, and he’s been given some pretty tough targets to meet. But watch how he uses the Performance Centre to transform himself into a target-hitting, goal-smashing, objective-obliterator! If you’re eager to find out more about what our Performance Centre is capable of, then you’re in luck! Check out the Performance Centre Series we’ve been writing on our blog to learn about the different areas of performance management and why you should be taking them online. And if you’re looking for more of a first-hand experience of the Performance Centre, why not take a free tour?  The post The Performance Centre - Brand new video! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Calling all performance management connoisseurs! This is the sixth part of our series on the remarkable world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Imagine if we were all the same. If we all liked the same food, if we all liked the same TV shows, or if we all liked Nickelback… Thankfully everyone is different, so we can all celebrate our individuality however we see fit! But one side effect of this is that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to development. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and our own needs when it comes to what will help us realise our potential. That’s where the Personal Development Plan, or PDP, comes in! It’s also known as the IDP (Individual Development Plan), and it acts as a roadmap for how an individual should drive their professional growth. So an employee should be able to look at their PDP at any time to find out exactly what work they should be doing to develop their knowledge and skills. Because it’s tailored to them, a good PDP acts like a jigsaw piece, filling in any gaps in an employee’s skillset and making them into a perfect, beautiful picture! How to approach Personal Development Plans When putting together PDPs for your staff, it’s important to be as clear about their purpose as possible. A 2011 study by Simon A.J. Beausaert found that PDPs are most effective when they’re clearly used to support employees in taking learning activities. This helps an employee to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, and to focus their learning efforts on eliminating any flaws. This of course then has the effect of improving their workplace performance. The PDP is also a great way for an employer to show that it is thinking about the development of its employees. Most of the performance management methods we’ve looked at up until now have been focused on tracking past and present results. But the PDP is forward-thinking, and shows that there is a plan in place to help you deliver better results in the future! After all, a study by the Association of Accounting Technicians found that 51% of employers see the main benefit of training to be increased staff commitment and retention. Your employees are far less likely to jump ship if they can see that you’re prepared to invest in their professional development, meaning you can reap the benefit of their boosted expertise! So how do we do it? The Personal Development Plan is the final area of our fully online Performance Centre. In our system, this section is all about looking forward and planning for the future! It’s where an employee heads to find out exactly what learning they need to do to reach their potential. The learning content they find is anything which their manager has recommended to them during the review phase, meaning that it’s tailored to fit their needs. But the real magic lies in the fact that the Performance Centre is fully integrated with our Academy LMS. So the employee doesn’t just see what they need to complete, they can actually access it from within the same system! A simple traffic light system tells them at a glance what they’ve done and what they still need to do, and they can rate how useful they find each recommendation. Bringing performance and learning management together in this way has a multitude of benefits, such as cutting confusion and boosting engagement. It’s a no-brainer! Want to try our Performance Centre first-hand? Take a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: What are Personal Development Plans? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

eLearning without video content is like the Eiffel Tower without tourists. It’s empty and sad without them. In most cases, it’s just unforgivably dull. If a picture speaks a thousand words, a two-minute video must have all the clout of a lengthy novel. In fact, the fine folks at Forrester Research took that old adage quite literally and calculated that a one minute video is worth 1.8 million words. That’s a lot of words. We just tried speaking really quickly, but we didn’t manage to fit even half that many words into a minute! We’re now accustomed to consuming information via video content - news, advertisements, documentaries, YouTube videos and the like. In fact, YouTube is now the world’s second most popular search engine, coming in just behind Ask Jeeves (just kidding, our lords and masters at Google are currently kicking it in first place). The truth is this: if you’ve got something important to say, it’s often easier and more effective to say it with a video. Still, despite all the evidence, Learning & Development types have been slow to embrace video within their content. We could just say that those who haven’t embraced video solutions are behind the times and leave it at that. But as we’re the giving type, we’ve cooked up THREE more compelling reasons why your eLearning needs to get up close and personal with some video content. Retention Extension Videos are memorable. Details find purchase within our mind and cling on for dear life. You’ll still probably remember individual scenes from TV programmes you watched as a kid, but can you recall individual sentences from the last book you read? If you can, you either have photographic memory, or need to get yourself over to MENSA immediately. The stats back this assertion up. Information that is ‘heard’ (such as a teacher discussing something in class), has a 10% retention rate. Information that is ‘seen’ (such as a teacher drawing something on a blackboard), has a 20% retention rate. But both of these rates pale in comparison to when information is both ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ (such as when you watch a video). In these cases, the viewer has a staggering 80% retention rate. Emotional Connection According to Simply Measured, video content gets shared 1200% more than text does. Text must be feeling pretty sheepish right about now. We’d wager that this discrepancy is in large part due to the emotional connection videos form with their audience. It’s easy to pull examples from the cinematic world (‘I am your Father!’), but this holds equally true within the eLearning landscape. If we have a video presenter guiding us through the content, we take more in and we enjoy the journey more. We form a low-level bond with the presenter. There’s something about the human face that plain text (or even emojis) can’t quite capture. This must surely explain the following set of statistics: 65% of video viewers watch more than three-quarters of a video. We are completists. (Source: ReelNReel) Videos currently take up 57% of all consumer internet traffic. That’s four times more than normal web browsing. (Source: Cisco) By 2018, this figure will have risen to 79%. In other words, video is becoming the way we communicate on the web. (Source: Cisco) We are video junkies. We are hooked and there’s no going back. YouTube’s very own Robert Kyncl has previously claimed that video will soon make up 90% of all internet traffic. Things certainly seem to be trending in that direction. We just need to make sure (collectively) that our eLearning follows suit. Learner Preference: Would you rather read a 12-page training manual, or kick your feet up on the desk and watch a 3-minute video? No doubt, there are some motivationally-challenged folks out there who would prefer the text-only option, if only because they’d be able to skim-read the content. But think about it. Do you really want to give your learners the ability to pick and choose what they consider to be the important elements of your training programme? As it happens, there’s a good chance that you picked the video option from the scenario above. Most people do. That’s because our brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than text, negating any real cognitive strain. Watching a video is a passive (but informative) process. Reading text is an active (though sometimes draining) process. In fact, studies have shown that sites which include video have on average, an extra two-minute ‘dwell time’ compared to sites that don’t. Given how much there is to explore, two minutes is a long time to spend doing anything on the web. (Source: comScore). What’s more, 59% of senior executives agree that when both text and video are available on the same topic on the same page, they prefer to watch the video. With that in mind, it begs the question: are you giving your learners what they want? ‘But I don’t have an in-house production team,’ we hear you cry. ‘How are we supposed to create the video content we need to pull off a successful training and development project?’ As with most things nowadays, this sort of work can be outsourced for prices ranging from ‘affordable’ to ‘you have to be kidding me!’ Heck, we could even help. We’re specialists in creating engaging learning technology solutions and we offer a range of video production services. Oh, and our Learning Management System, the Academy LMS is primed for video. Whether you’re including video within eLearning content, uploading it as a separate learning asset, sharing YouTube clips on the ‘What’s Happening’ social feed, or an Insight Group, we’ve got you covered. Want to find out more? Then let’s give you the tour. Seeing is believing, after all!  The post Three Reasons Why Your eLearning NEEDS to Embrace Video Content: appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Performance management experts, this is the seventh and final part of our series on the astonishing world of workplace performance management. If you like what you read, then please subscribe to our blog using the sidebar to the right, or follow us on Twitter for regular updates! Over the past few weeks we’ve taken a good look at some of the best ways to approach performance management. We’ve seen a lot of research which gives compelling reasons to take performance management seriously, and we’ve looked at why it’s best to be managing performance online. Now finally, we’re going to look at how our Performance Centre combines all of these features we’ve looked at into one comprehensive yet user-friendly package! It’s 100% online, so any employee can access it from any device and at any time. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also fully integrated with our multi-award winning Academy LMS, which means that all of your performance and learning needs are available in the same place! So how does it work? It comes down to five robust steps: Step 1: Objectives and KPIs This first section is for Objectives and KPIs. Here an employee can manage their own individual objectives, and also keep an eye on how their department and organisation as a whole are meeting their targets. Every over-arching goal is broken down into the Key Performance Indicators, the individual tasks which need to be completed to meet that objective. This gives everyone greater visibility about what exactly is being done to meet targets. And though employees set their own targets, everything has to be approved by their manager. If target-setting is falling short, the manager sends them back with comments attached. This ensures that only useful objectives are set. Finally, since our system is online, employees can update progress towards each KPI as they go along. So a manager can dip in whenever they want to get a real-time snapshot of how their team is doing. Handy! Step 2: Competencies The second area breaks down each employee’s job role into the individual Competencies it requires. This lets them keep track of their strengths and weaknesses, so that they can target their development to the areas which need more work. To make things as user-friendly as possible, each competency is followed by three sliders. The first slider is used by the employee to self-assess their ability in that area, anywhere from ‘foundation’ to ‘exemplary’. The second bar is then used by their manager to give their own assessment of that individual’s ability, and they can attach comments to explain any disagreements. The final bar is the target level, which someone in that job role should be at. Keeping an eye on this page is an easy way for an employee to make sure they’re focusing their efforts into building up their weaker skills, turning them into a complete, well-oiled performance powerhouse! Step 3: Values and Principles The third section is for Values and Principles, which includes some of the gamification features that we’re renowned for! This area serves as a reminder of the company’s defining values, and employees can earn badges for demonstrating them in the workplace. But there’s a catch… These badges can only be awarded by managers and colleagues! This helps foster a sense of team spirit, as everyone looks out for opportunities to reward each other’s hard work. Comments also get attached to badges so that it’s clear exactly what it was earned for. You can even set a target number of badges to earn within a set time, to nudge everyone into working hard to put company values into practice. Step 4: Reviews This fourth section deals with a staple part of any performance management programme - Reviews! It’s used heavily during the preparation for a real-world review of appraisal. So ahead of the meeting a manager will set some questions for the employee to answer, and to help guide their preparatory thinking. The manager can also leave comments before and after the review so that their entire thought process is on show. Then, since this is an online system, the employee can return to this section at any time to find full reports from all of their reviews! They include all of the comments their manager made, and also make note of how far they met their Objectives and KPIs for that period. Step 5: Personal Development Plan The fifth and final area of the Performance Centre ties together everything together into a Personal Development Plan, or PDP. Remember how we said that the Performance Centre is fully integrated with our Academy LMS? Well following a review, a manager will use a simple tick-box system to choose which learning content on the platform would be best for that employee to complete. This helps them focus their learning efforts on the areas which will give them the most gain for their time investment. The Personal Development Plan gathers all of this content in one place for easy access, and uses a simple traffic light system to show at a glance what they’ve already completed or started. Personal development has never been so easy! Want to run through this process first-hand? Sign up for a free tour today!  The post Performance Centre Series: Your One-Stop Performance Management Solution appeared first on Growth Engineering.