By Rhys Giles, Product Director, Fuse
We love a good Josh Bersin stat and this one is a shocker: In 2015, Bersin’s research found that amongst the 700+ organizations he and his colleagues studied the average employee only has 24 minutes a week for “formal learning.” As Josh said of the research, “people simply do not have as much time as they’d like to learn in a formal way, so this informal “in-the-flow” work is just necessary for success.”
We couldn’t agree more, which is why we have been working on Fuse Flow, our vision of taking the knowledge captured in the corporate brain and pushing it into the flow of work to support performance.
In this article, we’re going to explain how Fuse Flow is helping workers to do more with their limited learning time, getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time.
What Is The Flow Of Work?
Before we talk about Fuse Flow, it’s important to explain what we mean by ‘the flow of work.’ It’s a phrase used by Bersin, and one we refer to frequently.
Think about it like this: you’re working away and you hit a snag - you don’t, for example, remember a naming convention, a style of referencing, or perhaps even how to insert a ‘mailto’ link using simple HTML. You’re trying to get a task done, and as a modern worker, you’re already dealing with potential distractions from a million different sources.
You need a simple answer and you need to be able to apply it here, and now. And you need that answer to be as minimal a disruption to your flow of work as possible. In short, you need knowledge.
The problem is, most learning platforms are still very course and skills-based. Who’s got time to take a whole course? Even if you used up your whole 24 minutes that Josh Bersin reckons you have each week, you wouldn’t finish the course and you might not get the answer you need.
Fuse Flow is designed to avoid all that, delivering knowledge at the point of need that people can use immediately. It sounds simple, and it is, but Fuse Flow also opens up a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities (read on and we’ll tell you exactly how.)
Changing Work To Power Performance
We’re big believers in the power of marginal gains, and perhaps our favourite example of this was how coach David Brailsford propelled the British Olympic cycling team from mediocrity to greatness by applying what he called ‘the aggregation of marginal gains.’
His philosophy was that if you broke down all the things that went into cycling and improved them all by 1%, the aggregated gain would be significant and powerful. Sixteen gold medals over two Olympics and seven Tour de France wins in eight years proved Brailsford very firmly correct in his theories.
Fuse Flow works on the same basis. If we can help people to get just 1% better at their jobs every day by giving them the knowledge they need in the flow of work, then after a year, think of how significantly better they’ll be able to perform. With instant access to knowledge, think of how much Fuse Flow could help to power performance.
The learning from this is that you don’t have to introduce a brand new scale; you don’t have to do a macro task, a macro scale or a macro course. Focusing on the micro or the nano is what can really impact performance.
Taking Learning One Step Further With A Personalised Experience
Fuse Flow isn’t just changing the way people search for and access knowledge that they need at that very crucial moment in a project. It’s also changing the way we look at, manage and disperse knowledge amongst employees and communities on Fuse.
Using AI, Fuse Flow is giving users a more personalised experience by narrowing down recommendations to match the experience that a user may be having in their workflow at a particular moment in time. It creates a ‘corporate brain’ of contextually relevant content it can recommend based on relevance to individual users. It understands the site and pages that users visit, and can build dynamic search queries that can predict the performance support users need at an exact moment.
With Fuse Flow, users can also feature content. Administrators can assign content to any page directly in Fuse Flow. Questions are also a key functionality point. Users can ask questions and get answers. Natural Language Search uses dynamic filters and facets to give users the answer they need, whether through existing knowledge or asking an expert or the crowd.
These could be 32-second videos or just straight-up answers to questions. They could be descriptions of just one critical step in a process. Regardless of the form the knowledge takes, the important thing is that it’s personalised, instant, and keeps users in the flow of work.
Fuse Flow also indexes the answer ready for the next time a question is asked.
Fuse Flow Is Different
I think it’s important to underscore exactly how different our approach is with Fuse Flow. Most learning platforms focus on skills and formal career development training over a longer period of time.
These are certainly an important part of learning and performance and Fuse Flow also contributes to developing both, but what we have found over many years of dedicated experience is that skills, courses and too much focus on formal career development training are not what is driving high levels of performance.
We're very focused on driving performance in the flow work. If you're in the flow of work, and you need to take a 40-minute course to find the knowledge required to complete your task then - newsflash - you are no longer in the flow of work.
The time is now to capitalise on this new opportunity to support workers in the flow of work without breaking it. Make those 24 minutes of learning a week count.
If you’d like to learn more about knowledge in the flow of work, download our ebook Knowledge in the Flow of Work: 5 Ways to Power Learning.
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