With an estimated 50% of employees requiring reskilling by 2025, businesses that offer training and upskilling opportunities own a significant competitive advantage.

In this environment, the digital transformation of employee training through eLearning is a game changer. From onboarding to reskilling, online learning saves companies time and money, and has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and learn.

Effective and scalable eLearning gives your workforce the skills and capacity to adapt, innovate, and drive business growth to meet the challenges and opportunities of evolving global trends. However, unlocking the transformational aspects of going digital requires a shift of mindset. It starts with understanding key aspects unique to the digital learning experience.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

Effective eLearning incorporates principles of DEI by creating a sense of belonging for all course participants and helping them connect more deeply to the learning content. This not only improves the quality and effectiveness of employee training programs but can have a significant impact across your business.

Advantages of integrating DEI into your training program

• Increased profits. Companies without a DEI strategy or with an ineffective one are 27% less likely to be profitable compared to their peers. Bringing this practice to your training programs helps set the tone across your organization.
• Employee retention. Creating workplace environments that value the unique perspectives of employees reduces turnover. Demonstrating that you value your diverse employees through your training program content helps set this standard for every employee.
• Greater and more inspired innovation. Employees are more likely to innovate when they are empowered to bring their own ideas and worldviews to their work. Delivering improved, more inclusive training helps every employee grow their capacity and capability to innovate.

When inclusion flourishes, it permeates the whole work environment. It enables everyone to succeed, and it leaves no one out. It has a positive impact on people’s desire to work for an organization and how productive they are, the quality of decision making, customer relations, innovation, revenues, and reputations. ~ Rebekah Steele, INdivisible, 2020

How to leverage DEI to enrich your corporate learning programs

Championing DEI in learning involves engaging learners on a deeper level, for example, by:

• encouraging employees to bring their rich perspectives and realities to their learning experiences
• empowering employees to broaden their perspectives and innovate solutions for diverse markets
• exploring creative ways to promote DEI in organizational processes and practices

To achieve these objectives, digital learning programs can be made more accessible and inclusive through the following tactics.

Snapshot from an organizational training module on inclusive writing guidelines that we created for a client offering health support services for a diverse group of clients. We designed this custom writing guide to support their capacity to be inclusive in serving their market base. These kinds of writing considerations can be applied to any training program content and extend to any content developed by your organization.

• Ensure the stock images, videos, and illustrations used in a course reflect the diverse identities, backgrounds, and roles in your company.
• Use simple, clear, and inclusive language that everyone can easily understand and relate to. We recommend creating a company-wide inclusive writing framework that can be customized for each department.
• Incorporate video translations to serve a multilingual market. For Canadian organizations, consider French, American Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Quebecoise (LSQ). US organizations may prioritize Spanish and ASL.
• Give learners agency by providing a balanced mix of audio, text, images, and videos.
• Evaluate content for bias and preconceived assumptions about the employees and any other course participants. Are there options for flexibility in the learning program? Do all employees have access to resources and requirements to take the course?

Put learners at the centre of your training programs and watch them flourish.

User experience (UX) and accessibility

Today’s employees have high expectations of their online experiences and interfaces, and that includes your eLearning offerings. Leveraging the convenience and flexibility of eLearning requires expertise in designing a user experience that helps ensure employees can retain and connect new knowledge to their work.

Complicated learning software features, unfamiliar navigation controls, and disorganized course interfaces and content structure on learning management systems (LMSs) can make content inaccessible and difficult to understand.

Drawbacks of poor UX design

• Low learning engagement. Learners disengage when navigating poorly designed interfaces.
• Poor knowledge retention. Employees can’t assess their knowledge and retain information if the course interface and structure are not accessible, organized, and responsive.

How to enhance UX and accessibility to maximize eLearning ROI

Screenshot from a case study demonstrating user experience-led features we developed for George Brown College. Read the case study here.

• Ensure consistency in content flow, navigation controls, and design elements. (Leading with people-centred design allowed us to build a flexible and accessible eLearning program for George Brown College that is now being used across Ontario higher education institutions.)
• Make the course more flexible by providing access via multiple screen sizes and devices. It’s helpful to adapt the course to fit the needs of employees who prefer to learn on their smartphones and mobile devices.
• Tailor the interactions and activities to give choice and agency to the learners. For instance, you may want to incorporate features such as resource aids, personalized reflection activities, and scenario-based assessments to enable course participants to put their learning into practice.
• Deliver similar content in multiple formats—from text to images, quotes, and videos—to improve accessibility and enable participants to engage with content in more than one way and support the diverse learning preferences of each of your learners.

Digital instructional design principles

Instructional design is different from UX design in eLearning, although they work hand in hand. Instructional design focuses on how people learn and how to transform subject matter content into a learning product. UX design then leverages instructional design to ensure the course material translates seamlessly on an LMS platform and is usable, scalable, effective, and accessible to all course participants.

Business impacts of incorporating instructional design principles into corporate training

Implementing instructional design principles in your training programs benefits your employees and organization, improving eLearning ROI in the following ways:

• Enhanced productivity and engagement. From onboarding to reskilling, effective learning programs empower people with the skills to become more effective at their jobs, which leads to increased efficiency and productivity.
• Improved retention. A 2023 Work Institute report analyzing employee retention complexities shows that professional development is a leading reason people resign. Learner-centred training programs help address this by opening up ways for employees to add value and impact to the business while pursuing self-improvement.
• Saved costs. It costs more to hire new employees than to train and reskill existing ones. Improving retention through people-focused professional development programs will save you time and money while adding to your bottom line.

Investing in learning helps establish a critical competitive advantage—and eLearning designed with a focus on DEI, UX, and instructional design will give your organization a chance to realize this advantage in terms of hiring, employee retention, and performance.

Start the discussion about eLearning ROI with your learning and training team by asking the following questions:

• Is there more we could be doing to make our eLearning programs inclusive, accessible, and effective for all employees?
• Are we creating opportunities for learners to apply new knowledge and skills in their work?
• How are we leveraging the latest eLearning practices to improve retention and productivity?

Interested in learning more about how to maximize the impacts of your digital learning and training programs?

We’d love to chat. Our multidisciplinary team at Say Yeah specializes in delivering holistic and customized corporate eLearning solutions that help organizations turn training into a competitive advantage.

Get in touch

The post How to Maximize Your Company’s Learning & Development ROI in 2024 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

People, and the frameworks we use for understanding people, are at the heart of effective strategy and design work.

We’ve previously explored how there is no average person, which makes it challenging to use personas and archetypes to qualify an audience or user.

Why is it so difficult to group people together?

Because driving our inherent complexity is the intersectionality and fluidity of who we are.

People are complex & fluid

Often when designers or strategists talk about people or users, there’s a tendency to assume that people fit into neat, one-size-fits-all boxes that describe behaviour and experiences universally within that group. For instance, you might hear a product team talk about how something could work better for new moms, or for people from New York who don’t like pizza, or for basketball fans who visit a site once a week.

It’s not that simple, however, to understand the human complexities that make up your audience or user base. There are so many identities, circumstances, and fluid behaviours that influence your users, on a moment-to-moment basis, and on a longer-term basis.

All of the individual factors that make up identity and user contexts are most influential when we think about how they combine to influence how someone engages with products and services.

A concept called intersectionality is a better way of looking at all of the factors that can influence the use of your products and services.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a way of thinking through how factors of identity (gender, race, sexuality, class, and many more) interact with one other and form a clearer picture of who someone is.

In understanding how these factors combine, we can more deeply understand an individual user’s priorities and context of use.

Another area that is important as part of intersectional thinking is the concept of fluidity. Factors including culture, geography, mood, behaviour, abilities (temporary and permanent), different devices, and internet connections are circumstantial or ever-changing influences on user needs and behaviour.

Since many of these areas are constantly shifting (abilities, mood, place, devices), even a snapshot of who we are at this moment isn’t necessarily representative of us on any given day.

Considering how all of these factors impact one another for your users is vital to delivering inclusive products & services. Illustration by Kate Matesic

Intersectional factors to consider for your users

These factors, and infinite other factors, shape how users behave and perceive interactions, alongside their identities, and are a crucial piece of a more comprehensive lens for viewing your users and other stakeholders.

How intersectionality influences design and strategy work

Intersectionality, user contexts, and an understanding of the fluidity of your users should form the backbone of all of the human-centred design and strategy work you undertake, whether you’re looking to improve an existing product or service or create a new one.

In general, consider that any time you want to group people, no matter how you categorize them, whether, by race, age, behaviour, interests, or any other grouping of factors, every person in that group may be different across any number of other factors.

Your team may typically leverage tools like marketing personas to build out your design or product requirements. However, personas and similar generalizations aren’t well suited to the complexity of your users.

There are many other methods you can use to go beyond personas when you’re looking to engage authentically with people. These can include user states and context maps, Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), and user stories.

Learn more about going beyond personas

The impact of intersectional thinking

Making strategy and design decisions with intersectionality at the forefront will guide your team in identifying genuinely user-centric design requirements.

Once you establish these requirements, your product or service will be able to meet the goals and expectations of your users across different circumstances, contexts, and environments, and to embrace their unique identity.

By understanding how all of these factors mix and interact to form the experiences of your users, you can design your products and services in a much more intentional way. Ultimately, this means delivering products and services that can be used and loved by a much broader market, while improving the experience for your existing users as well.

Not sure how to get started with an intersectional, inclusive design process?

From our inclusive public sector work to our insurance, banking, and other private sector work, we continue to develop our inclusive design practice and bring impactful service design and product strategy outcomes to the organizations and communities we work with.

Learn more about our approach to inclusive design

View article in uxmag.com

The post Intersectionality: a critical piece of your service and product strategy, published by UX Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.

We’ve previously explored how there is no average person, which makes it challenging to use personas and archetypes to qualify an audience or user.

Why is it so difficult to group people together?

Because behind our inherent complexity is the intersectionality and fluidity of who each us as individuals is. We are all incredibly nuanced and different, more individual than archetype.

People are complex & fluid

Often when designers or strategists talk about people or users, there’s a tendency to assume that people fit into neat, one-size-fits-all boxes that describe behaviour and experiences universally within that group. For instance, you might hear a product team talk about how something could work better for new moms, or for people from New York who don’t like pizza, or for basketball fans who visit a site once a week.

It’s not that simple, however, to understand the human complexities that make up your audience or user base. There are many identities, circumstances, and fluid behaviours that influence your users, on a moment-to-moment and longer-term basis.

All of the individual factors that make up identity and user contexts are most influential when we think about how they combine to influence how someone engages with products and services. The complex factors and examples shared above bring us well beyond typical demographics such as age and gender. Together, all of these factors and more represent who each individual person is.

We can better understand the individuals our products, services, and learning programs are designed for by leveraging a concept called intersectionality.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a way of thinking through how human, technological, and sociological factors interact with one another to form a clearer picture of who someone is.

In understanding how these factors combine, we can more deeply understand an individual’s priorities and context of use of any given product, service, or learning program.

Be flexible to fluidity

Another area that is important as part of intersectional thinking is the concept of fluidity. Factors related to culture, geography, mood, behaviour, and abilities (temporary and permanent), as well as different devices, screen sizes, and internet connections, are ever-changing influences on user needs and behaviour.

Since many of these areas are constantly shifting (abilities, mood, place, devices), even a snapshot of who we are at this moment isn’t necessarily representative of us on any given day. This is where being flexible to the fluidity of circumstances that impact each person can have a meaningful impact on experience design and customer service.

The complete set of high-level intersectional factors to consider

Each of these factors plays a role in shaping how each of us behaves and perceives products, services, content, language, and interactions.

How intersectionality influences design and strategy work

Intersectionality, user contexts, and an understanding of the fluidity of your users should form the backbone of all of the human-centred design and strategy work you undertake, whether you’re looking to improve an existing product or service or create a new one.

In general, consider that any time you want to group people, no matter how you categorize them, whether, by race, age, behaviour, interests, or any other grouping of factors, every person in that group may be different across any number of other factors.

Your team may typically leverage tools like marketing personas to build out your design or product requirements. However, personas and similar generalizations aren’t well suited to the complexity of your users.

There are many other methods you can use to go beyond personas when you’re looking to engage authentically with people. These can include user states and context maps, Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), and user stories.

Learn more about going beyond personas

The impact of intersectional thinking

Making strategy and design decisions with intersectionality at the forefront will guide your team in identifying genuinely user-centric design requirements.

Once you establish these requirements, your product or service will be able to meet the goals and expectations of your users across different circumstances, contexts, and environments, and to embrace their unique identity.

By understanding how all of these factors mix and interact to form the experiences of your users, you can design your products and services in a much more intentional way. Ultimately, this means delivering products and services that can be used and loved by a much broader market, while improving the experience for your existing users.

Not sure how to get started with an intersectional, inclusive design process?

From our inclusive public sector work to our healthcare, insurance, banking, and other private sector work, we’ve developed and continue to mature the leading inclusive design playbook. Reach out now to bring impactful service design, product strategy, and learning outcomes to the markets, communities, organizations, and employees you work with.

Learn more about our approach to inclusive design

Article last updated: June 20, 2023

The post Intersectionality: a critical piece of your service and product strategy appeared first on Say Yeah!.

1. Common digital transformation practices
2. The 150 year old myth that’s screwing up your service model and product strategy
3. The three levels of inclusive maturity
4. Level 1: Recruit a diverse team
5. Level 2: Establish a welcoming corporate culture
6. Level 3: Design inclusive products and services
7. What can you do to level up your inclusive maturity?

Common digital transformation practices

As digital transformation has been an increasing enterprise and public sector priority over the past decade, we’ve been charting industry-wide progress in meeting digital transformation objectives across both operational and consumer-centric areas of service. Working with organizations across myriad industries over the past decade, from enterprise to startups, public sector to not-for-profits, we’ve seen some common patterns emerge in how prepared and capable organizations are when it comes to digital transformation and digital excellence. A key part of our service design and product strategy work is executing an organizational digital maturity assessment. By measuring the digital maturity of an organization, we can gauge where challenges in planning, decision-making, and execution can be expected, and work with this knowledge to support improving service delivery and customer experience.

For years this has formed the basis of our work in helping organizational “level up” in the processes they use to develop more capable teams and improved product and service outcomes. But this is not enough.

Digital and technology literacy training, service design and product strategy processes, and mapping organizational ecosystems and markets, however mature these processes may be, have historically been modelled based on an 150 year old myth.

This presents a challenge for organizations of all backgrounds when they’re growing their digital capability through training and hiring, and continuing age-old practices that underdeliver value.

So let’s take a brief look at this myth and how it’s impacting your product and service offerings.

The 150 year old myth that’s screwing up your service model and product strategy

There’s a commonly held tenet that by designing for the “average” person we can serve 80% of the market. That we need to focus on the “average” and avoid the edge cases for efficiency and scale.

Why is this a fallacy? Simply put: because there is no average person.

As a species, we have never looked like, been built like, or acted like any kind of average. Certainly, societal ideals and standards of behaviour lent a false credibility to the average fallacy over the decades.

But as we have accelerated our geographic and cultural mobility toward multiculturalism, pluralism, and mixed relationships, the lines have been radically blurred from those legacy ideals.

And an increasingly self-aware society blurs those lines even further in recognizing gender identifies, neurodiversity, and other characteristics and behaviours. Characteristics that move us so beyond a possible average that we can hardly justify grouping people into any kind of archetype or persona.

“Personas often contain a compilation of ‘average’ characteristics that, put together, actually represent no one.” ~ Margaret Price, Kill Your Personas, Microsoft Design, 2018

This is made all the more complex because, even as individuals, we are hardly static in our own behaviour, beliefs, and identities, which can change by mood, life status, or simply day to day needs.

Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Persona Spectrum highlighting different states of being. Across touch, sight, hearing, and speaking, every one of us can have permanent, temporary, or situational changes in ability. Understanding and designing with these variables in mind helps us deliver products and services for everyone.

This means that when we design for the average we are increasingly designing for no one. That impacts the quality, capability, and credibility of our products and services themselves, how we articulate value to markets, and how markets perceive those products and services.

For a deeper dive, read the full “average” fallacy article

Thankfully, there is a better way. And that is to work to serve the diversity of the markets your organization operates in by thinking individuals over archetypes: moving beyond the average, beyond the archetype, and working toward understanding all the nuances of individuals. Embracing fluidity, intersectionality, and a diversity of market. That’s what diversity, equity, and inclusion helps organizations achieve, and that’s why it’s the only path to effectively serving diverse markets and the individuals who are a part of them.

To get there, you need to work through a series of processes that are baked into our DNA to reshape your organization and outcomes. But before you make the leap to process and activities, understanding where your organizational maturity sits across the three levels of inclusive maturity is the knowledge you’ll need to highlight gaps, opportunities, and priorities. In other words, as much as it’s important to uncover and track an organization’s digital maturity, so too is it essential to understand and shape your organization’s inclusive maturity.

So let’s look at those three levels of maturity on the path to diversity, equity, and inclusion excellence.

The three levels of inclusive maturity

Many companies have embarked on their own diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) journey. With plenty of data and examples of how more diverse workforces can deliver more effective products and services, for-profit and public sector leaders have been working increasingly hard to bring these capabilities to their organizations.

In a study done by Boston Consulting Group, “companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation”- World Economic Forum

In addition, when companies are more diverse, they inherently are more likely to innovate outside of existing solutions, driving significant increases in revenue for the company, and better product and service outcomes. Companies with above-average diversity had nearly 20% more average revenue created from innovation. 

When organizations begin their DEI journey, they typically begin a 3-step journey across three levels of maturity, which is not to oversimplify this journey. There are challenges at each level and they cover distinct organizational units, each requiring leadership support to achieve success.

Let’s look at these three levels of maturity in detail.

Level 1: Recruit a diverse team

This is a natural place for an organization to start their DEI initiatives. When leadership understands the value of establishing a more diverse workforce, recruiting is tasked with reaching out to a broader spectrum of candidates, and the path to inclusive maturity begins.

The objective: you have a homogeneous workforce, therefore you look to hire a diverse workforce.

From a process point of view, your organization will establish inclusive recruiting processes to fill gaps in the current mix of employees. This involves being intentional about how you present the organization, job opportunities, and how and where you post opportunities. This will include reaching out to organizations, communities, recruiters, and established educational institutions to connect with a broader range of potential recruits. You may go so far as supporting or establishing additional training and youth programs to support a next generation of diverse talent. You will absolutely review hiring practices, tackle topics like unconscious biases, and be considerate of wage gaps and opportunities for people who do not identify within the makeup of your currently homogenous team.

The challenge: you hire a diverse group of people, but they are not welcome within your culture.

Hitting this Level 1 wall is a big hit to your organization. All the effort that’s gone into recruiting and hiring practices is undermined if those hires aren’t supported once they start work.

Diverse employees who are brought into homogenous cultures last an average of 6 months before they need to get the heck out of there!

Think of how this impacts an organization: recruiting efforts are costly; then you train to get people up to speed. You bring excellent talent into the organization and have the opportunity to learn and improve from their experience and unique perspective in your otherwise homogenous culture, but they are not only not set up to success, but chances are you’ll lose them within months.

Not only is there the cost of a failed hire, but there’s opportunity cost here in failing to deliver product and service enhancements because you lose that expertise and perspective.Worse still, you risk losing access to entire employee markets if your corporate culture is deemed toxic for some people.

As a result, you must mature into establishing a welcoming corporate culture.

Level 2: Establish a welcoming corporate culture

There’s a natural progression here. As you hire more diverse employees into a homogenous culture, you need to establish protocols and processes to support this more diverse group of individuals. When people can bring their authentic selves to work, have the comfort to be themselves, and feel a sense of belonging, they can excel. More importantly, they can dramatically impact the capability of the team to deliver exceptional products and services.

A report on the importance of belonging in the workplace noted that ” Feelings of belonging have been related to a variety of positive work behaviours and, for some employees, can be an even greater motivator than compensation. In addition, scientists claim that humans cannot be healthy—emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or physically—without feeling connected to others. Consequently, implementing belonging strategies will result in organizational benefits.” ~ Feminuity, “What about belonging?” report

There’s been a lot of tech community work, research, and practice around efforts to establish processes around developing more inclusive work cultures. Internal organizational priorities within Human Resources—and the advent of the Chief Diversity Officer and related roles—have led to significant capability and focus in achieving inclusive cultures within organizations.

The objective: through inclusive workplace practices you develop a more welcoming and inclusive work environment.

This has helped address the retention issues of Level 1 focused organizations. Where inclusive workplace environments retain diverse talent and offer an opportunity for people from many varied and intersectional backgrounds to succeed.

In fact, established diverse product and service teams are both empowered to and successfully shape product and service. However, it’s not enough to attempt to build a diverse organization in the hopes that the outcome is a product or service that meets the requirements of a diverse market.

The issue being that even with a more diverse team, two factors come into play:

1. Teams default to designing for themselves. The more diverse your team, the more likely they’ll develop products and services that serve a greater number of people because there are different voices, different experiences, and different perspectives at the table.
2. But the complexity of the market means that you can’t hope to hire a diverse enough product and service team to serve all the facets of the individuals that make up that market by relying on your team to naturally meet all those individual and intersectional expectations.

Serving the varied individuals that make up a broadly diverse market doesn’t happen by accident, it requires intention to move beyond an internal team and connect with the people the organization serves directly and authentically. And that’s where Level 3 of inclusive maturity becomes a necessity.

Level 3: Design inclusive products and services

Level 3 is all about intention. There’s a clear segue from recruiting to establishing a welcoming workplace. You’re focusing on strengthening, growing, and scaling your internal capabilities in order to deliver better products and services. But the very nature of this relationship between Level 1 and Level 2 highlights the gap: it’s insular. You’re focused on your internal culture, and missing how your organization manifests itself to the market.

The key to Level 3 is shifting perspective from inside the organization to who the market is and being intentional about engaging with the diverse individuals who make up that market.

The objective: by establishing practices to engage in an authentic manner with the diverse makeup of your market, you can provide products and services that capture more market share.

The requirements to achieve this objective include having a comprehensive approach to delivering products and services that focuses on usability, accessibility, and inclusion. Together, these core values ensure that no user is left behind, and your products and services thrive by serving a diverse market.

Usability: ensuring a frictionless, engaging, and delightful experience.

Accessibility: ensuring there are no barriers to serving someone.

Inclusion: welcoming diverse market segments to engage authentically with your organization.

The challenge: product teams have to break the cycle of designing for the average and find ways to connect with and serve diverse individuals.

Breaking the cycle of designing for the average through personas and archetypes is a challenging effort for most product teams as it goes against much of what has been taught and learned. The best product and service teams have taken steps through methodologies such as use cases, jobs-to-be-done, and the behavioural objectives and outcomes of users. But this still is not enough if there aren’t processes to welcome the broad spectrum of the market into the discussion.

Pinterest has expanded its makeup search results to include a skintone selector, ensuring that people can narrow makeup searches to those products that work for their skin. “This feature is a result of our technical and Inclusion & Diversity teams working closely together.” Learn more about how this works with this post from Pinterest’s Laksh Bhasin.

Diverse product and service teams have the added benefit of already having some breadth of the market in the room by virtue of the different voices and perspectives they already have in the room, but if the tendency remains to just design for the voices in the room, the market will still remain underserved.

That’s why it’s so essential to follow inclusive design practices that go beyond Level 1 and 2 DEI objectives. And be intentional about connecting with and learning from the diverse people who make up your market.

What can you do to level up your inclusive maturity?

By implementing inclusive practices within your organization, from recruiting to workplace culture to inclusive design practices, you’ll be prepared to serve more diverse markets more effectively.

Understanding your organization’s inclusive maturity at each level is the knowledge you need to uncover the gaps, opportunities, and priorities that will help you connect and capture the full scale of the market you serve. This knowledge sets you up for being more capable and intentional with your DEI strategy.

Organizational assessments and inclusive design practices are baked into our DNA.

Let’s talk about how we can work together to level up your inclusive maturity.

Get in touch

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