Recent research conducted by Accenture revealed that organizations are losing over $11 trillion because of outdated education and technology in the workplace. And this is seriously impacting the fate of our economic environment.
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Read “The Economic Risks of Outdated Education and Technology in the Workplace” for the highlights.
Here’s more about what you can do as a learning and development professional to help mitigate some of the risks stimulated by outdated education and technology in the workplace.
Implement the Appropriate Technologies and Training Programs
Before implementing any type of technology for your organization, you must first:
- Make sure you have employees who can properly implement it and mange it.
- Verify that the technology is necessary for your organization and its goals.
- Ensure you will be able to develop and manage training programs for it on a regular basis.
Monitor Employee Work Performance, Not Tech Performance
Instead of tracking the performance of your technologies, focus on how easy or challenging they make your employees’ jobs. Do they actually help your employees be more efficient and productive, or do your employees take longer to manage and use them?
If your employees aren’t performing as well as they used to long after a technology is implemented, it’s probably doing more harm than good for your organization and its goals.
Continually Analyze What Tech Skills Your Employees Need
As your employees work with and start to rely on various types of technology to automate certain tasks and augment others, make sure you are analyzing what types of skills they need to be most productive alongside such technology.
Do they need to learn more about the major components of a technology, how to use its interface, how to program it to do certain things, or something else?
Upskill Your Employees’ Tech Skills on a Rolling Basis
With the average life span of a skill being 5 years or fewer in today’s workforce, it’s imperative that you constantly upskill your employees to ensure they know how to use the technology that they rely on and work with every day.
If you don’t, the technology itself will inevitably lose its value and usefulness for your employees, as well as your entire organization.
Focus on Experiential Learning
Employees need more hands-on learning opportunities with technology before they’re expected to use it every day to complete work tasks. Some technologies just aren’t intuitive to use. And some employees just aren’t as adept at learning how to use certain technologies for their everyday work tasks.
Be sure to offer your employees experiential learning opportunities so that they know how to fully maximize it. And then the overall value and return on investment for such technology will remain high for your entire organization.
Don’t waste money on technology anymore. Keep the best practices listed above in mind, and mitigate the risks of outdated education and technology in your workplace today.