Improving your employee training process with an internal business app

An enterprise level, internal business app is the perfect solution for innovating your company’s employee training. More accessible and less resource intensive than traditional employee training programs, internal business apps are, most importantly, much more cost and time efficient than their traditional predecessors.

Internal business apps provide a platform that empowers the growth of your employees – as individuals, professionals, and team members – all scalable, and all within an affordable budget.

Before we get into the how of this topic, I want to cover the why:

The psychology of self-fulfillment apps

Just what is a self-fulfillment app? It’s any app that helps an individual better themselves – while they exist in different spaces, fitness trackers and internal business apps would both fall into this classification.

In fact, when implemented correctly, the structure and UX of the training portion of an internal business app should closely resemble that of a fitness app.

They’re very similar to each other, especially when the internal business app is used to provide or enhance your employees’ training – and just like a fitness app, your internal business app’s training program should focus on rewarding your employees for reaching action or comprehension milestones while on their path of growth.

Why is this? Just as fitness apps use this milestone method to increase user engagement and retention, so too can your internal business app. While employee training might be a virtually mandatory step in the hiring process, this doesn’t mean employees are highly – or sometimes, even moderately – engaged with the process.

With many new positions, employees going through training can find themselves inundated with excess amounts of new information – this can lead to overload, or even to your new employees tuning out for the rest of their training.

By implementing a rewarding, individually-trackable training experience for new employees, you can rid your company of these systemic issues. The best part is, this process doesn’t have to come to a close – internal business apps can empower your employees’ growth throughout their entire career at your company.

Let’s get into some concrete examples:

On-boarding

Imagine being able to start new employee orientation as soon as they’ve signed their offer letter. Along with the email you’ve sent, you can also include a link to your enterprise app. From here, the new employee can complete paperwork that usually takes up a significant portion of their first day.

During this first touch your new employee has with your business’ internal culture and processes, you can adjust the amount of guidance to whatever fits your needs – from live chat features to video calls. Or, you can go the fully automated route, if this portion of your on-boarding needs to be streamlined.

As your new employees progress through orientation, your app can act as their own guide, keeping them appraised of what’s coming next in the training process. This helps them prepare before hand, lessening the time spent introducing the topic that is about to be taught, or from scrambling for necessary resources at the last minute.

Your internal app can also act as a reference point during any step in the new employee training process, allowing new employees to find answers without interrupting training sessions.

When new employees have the power to look back and see the entirety of what they’ve learned (as well as the ability to reference the details of your business’ processes), they’re less likely to feel overwhelmed, and more likely to feel in control – and therefore, are more likely to fully engage with their training.

New employee on-the-job training

While nothing beats human interaction when being taught a new subject or process, an internal app can enhance the efficiency of your new employees’ on-the-job training. Very rarely does a co-worker or manager have carte blanche access to their schedule for a day; so when that new employee is inevitably faced with a situation where they don’t know how to proceed, and the employee training them isn’t around, they can reference the provided guides to handle the problem themselves.

This improves efficiency twofold; your veteran employees can spend more time doing what they do best – producing product, and bringing in new customers – and your new employees can solidify their knowledge retention by having the ability to answer their own questions.

This is very similar to an already tried-and-true method of information dissemination tech companies have used for over a decade – Stack Overflow. Tech companies are extremely process oriented – both when it comes to budgeting for labor, and the structure of code. In order to improve efficiency, developers will upload coding solutions to Stack Overflow for other developers on their team to utilize and learn from. This helps ensure stronger code, as well as increases efficiency for new employees and their team alike.

When new employees have the power to find the solution to a problem they face on their own, they’re much more likely to ask the question in the first place, rather than ignore the issue until it becomes an endemic problem.

Even better, you can cater these reference materials to different learning styles and situations – everything from pre-recorded video to simple presentations, or even tech documents and spreadsheets – these are all viable forms of information dissemination through an internal business app.

New employee on-site, real-time training

While it might not be realistic for every businesses’ budget to implement AR headsets for every on-site worker (like BMW and their mechanics), it is within the realm of possibility for a company to implement a few for new employee training purposes.

In a blog we wrote earlier this year about MxR and its implications for labor-based jobs, we touched on the experience Cnet’s Ian Sherr and Scott Stein had with Microsoft’s HoloLens2, which they reported to feel like “practical magic.”

Why did it feel like magic, and what does an AR headset have to do with new employee training?

MxR headsets now have the ability to interact – in real time – with the environment around the wearer. Both Sherr and Stein – neither of whom claim to be auto mechanics – were able to complete a set of repairs on an ATV engine with live guidance from a HoloLens2.

What this means for your business is a more efficient use of labor hours when bringing a new employee into the field. Your veteran employees can, again, spend their time doing their jobs while the new employee is guided by a real-time, accurate system that provides step-by-step, visual directions.

Continuous learning and growth

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of an internal business app’s training capacity is its ability to be included with the other processes your enterprise level app provides – like inventory management or culture and communication.

When something new is added to your business processes that everyone needs to know, you can send out a push notification with a link that brings all of your employees to the new information – or, you can segment targeted information to the team that needs to be in the know, in order to maximize the efficiency of your other employees.

Employees, at any moment necessary, can reference all of your training materials at any point in their careers – which keeps bad habits from forming, and helps re-align inefficiency.

As your employees foster a culture of continuous learning, new employees will be more readily brought up to speed, as information given to them is guaranteed to be uniform, and standards are always expressly laid out, in plain view for everyone in your company to view at any time.

Scalability

Most impressive is an internal business app’s scalability and reach – when all of your employees have access to everything they’d ever need (no matter where they are or what they’re doing), you can ensure every employee receives the same standard of training.

This is especially beneficial for offices that work remotely from each other, as it can save countless hours of deciphering one another’s work. Process uniformity can have a positive impact in localized offices as well – but when working remotely, this issue is more profound – and therefore, the solution is more noticeable.

An internal business app’s training capabilities are also scalable on a sense of time – it’s incredibly easy to enhance your training methods, as well as the information provided to new and old employees alike.

A personalized, yet uniform employee training experience

That’s what your new employees get when your business uses an internal business app to enhance or provide new employee training. Not only does this benefit employees at the beginning of their tenure at your company, it helps to ensure a uniform continued growth path for new and old employees alike – whether or not their orientation was through your enterprise level app or via a more traditional route.

Internal business apps give your company the ability to cater to different learning styles, without holding separate training sessions – new employees can watch a video explaining your data management system all while reading along with the provided tech doc, or reference slides instead – whatever works best for them.

With an internal business app’s gamification of the usually (let’s face it) less-than-exciting process of learning a company’s operations – as well as the ability to track and reference past accomplishments and knowledge, and easy scalability for any business model – improving your business’ new employee training with an internal business app is achievable for any company’s budget.