Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are a fairly new innovation in the learning and development space that allows for employee training to be embedded within existing software solutions. Employees receive interactive help to learn more about their role and the systems required, and HR teams save time and money on delivering catch-all training programs that leave little room for individualized development.
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Why Integrate DAP into Your Learning and Development Strategy?
Integrating digital adoption platforms into your learning and development strategy provides numerous benefits, not least by largely reducing the amount of manual intervention required to deliver effective employee training programs.
1. Tailor learning and training toward each employee
Training programs require a great deal of preparation and significant time investment to deliver. It's simply not practical to deliver one-to-one training to every employee, with an individualized training plan for each person
However, with a digital adoption platform, that’s precisely what you can achieve. Through a combination of walkthroughs, tooltips, and integrated software guidance, you can target the needs of each employee without having to hold their hand as they learn.
2. Boost your workforce’s engagement
Around 80% of employees feel that well-structured and relevant training would help to boost their engagement. This highlights a crucial need to ensure that learning and development are not an afterthought.
Employee engagement is about more than just maximizing your return on investment in an employee. Engagement can affect everything from absenteeism to quality of work, to employee retention and burnout.
So, by using a digital adoption platform, you can ensure that training is individualized and delivered in a timely manner as part of every employee onboarding experience.
3. Gain greater insight over your training success
Digital adoption platforms make reporting and employee tracking simpler. You’ll easily be able to see the progress of individual employees at a glance, setting out a learning and development pathway that can be followed through with minimal time investment on your part.
With comprehensive reporting and oversight, you’ll quickly be able to see how relevant your training provisions are for each individual role and team, allowing you to make adjustments and ensure relevant training is provided in every instance.
4. Improve employee satisfaction
It’s a common misconception that remuneration is the sole, or at least a vast part of, employee job satisfaction. In reality, there are myriad of factors that contribute to an employee feeling satisfied in their role.
These factors include opportunities such as career development, opportunities for development within an organization, training, and more. So, by utilizing a digital adoption platform to provide immediate access to training and development opportunities, you can enhance employee satisfaction without any direct, hands-on input.
5. Increase productivity in the workplace
Relatively new research has linked harder work to employee happiness, and happiness at work is largely influenced by engagement and job satisfaction, as we’ve already highlighted above. Not to mention, employees can become frustrated when they hit an obstacle at work that slows down their output.
Integrating a digital adoption platform into your existing solutions can help to remove barriers by allowing employees to self-serve. With embedded tutorials and tooltips, your workforce is less likely to misunderstand what they’re required to do, promoting continued work, happiness, and engagement.
Other Benefits of DAP in Employee Learning and Development
So, besides the central benefits of digital adoption platforms, including greater oversight and improved productivity and engagement, how else could a DAP help to drive learning and development success in your organization?
1. Supports cross-training for multiple applications
The number of digital tools being used for business is rapidly increasing, but not every employee will have the specialized knowledge to use them all. Manual training programs can require a lot of time when there are multiple systems to learn. Consider that you may have to schedule an hour-long training session for five different applications; that’s already an entire workday that’s lost to training requirements, and there’s still no guarantee that it’s enough time to instil confidence in your new employees.
Whether your new hires require training in videoconferencing software, customer relationship management software, design tools, or anything else, DAPs can pick up the work involved in training new users. Since training is integrated into the software, your employees will always have access to guidance on a continuous basis as long as they need it.
2. Ensures training is fit for purpose
Traditional learning and development programs are often designed without any individualized thought. That is, they're designed to appease and upskill a large group, even when that group comprises numerous different roles in the workplace. But while a data analyst will benefit from a detailed look at reporting software, a UX designer may not require this knowledge to the same extent.
Understanding your users' needs is essential, and DAP software can help you to analyze key areas for development, including where an employee is falling behind, what workflows they're using, and how they spend the bulk of their day.
Armed with this information, you can create learning and development workflows that target each employee and their training needs, rather than using a catch-all training program that can be largely irrelevant in parts for some employees.
3. Avoids constant, costly retraining
Major applications such as Salesforce release periodic updates that can add new features or transform the way that previous features inherently work. While this innovation helps drive business capabilities, it can also be a pitfall for employees who are left confused about how a new or existing feature works.
When such updates are released for any software, the training circuit begins anew. Learning and development teams need to understand the software, before putting together and delivering a new training program, all of which costs time and money to the organization.
But with DAP, businesses can embed these walkthroughs directly into the software itself, ensuring that every new employee receives relevant guidance from day one.
4. Aids in information retention
Employees are only likely to remember around 30% of new information after 24 hours. No matter how comprehensive your training program is, it’s inevitable that your employees simply won’t recall all of the information they’re taught during a fixed training session. This paves the way for retraining or constant support tickets that can bog down a support team.
The solution? Embedding training or self-help widget directly into your existing software solutions provides a constant reminder – where needed – about how to perform key tasks and use critical features. If you nurture an environment of self-help through digital adoption platforms, you’re sure to see a reduction in support tickets and requests for retraining.
5. Supports digital employee onboarding
Digital employee onboarding has become a boon for many companies that are facing new challenges around employee engagement. A largely remote-working environment means that training and development have become more difficult – engaging employees in meaningful training programs isn’t always as straightforward using videoconferencing software when compared to face-to-face sessions.
DAP software streamlines digital employee onboarding by providing a wealth of opportunities for remote employees to learn their roles. Your new starters can be provided with a custom workflow that allows them to learn the various organizational systems at their own pace, reaching out for help when they need it.
Digital Adoption Platforms: Where to Start
With a number of rising digital adoption platforms in the industry, it can be difficult to know where to start. As with any software, you can lean on existing reviews and recommendations for the best DAP software in the industry.
According to G2, Usetiful is the Momentum Leader for 2023, being the easiest platform to integrate with among digital adoption platforms. Usetiful is designed to solve a growing problem of lack of knowledge around customer onboarding, detailed walkthroughs, and crucially, user self-service.
You can start to integrate this DAP in your learning and development strategy right away, and entirely free. Get started with Usetiful to see how it could benefit you.