How ORC increased learning content 115% in months and cut time to find it using HowNow.

The challenge

Their employees were vocal about their desire for clearer career paths, but the ORC team knew there were lots of small mountains to climb first.

Resources were scattered, subject matter experts weren’t being tapped into, and they needed to build a learning culture – all without a dedicated L&D team.

The process

HowNow had to become the single source for learning, and people had to view it that way!

Tapping into Power Users, ORC is building a culture where people share, search for and find knowledge socially, organically and on demand.

ORC’s pain points

1: Building a learning culture without a dedicated L&D team.

2: Providing clearer, more frequent development opportunities.

3: Scattered resources and needing a single place for learning.

Overcoming the challenges

The feedback from ORC’s people was clear, they wanted clearer career paths, asking questions like ‘where can I go in the company and how can I grow?’

For the ORC team, there was a simpler question to answer first. Where do you go to find resources that make you better at your job? And how can we create that content without a dedicated L&D team?

As Kayshia Kruger, Director of Organisation Development, explains, ORC “didn’t have a space to host all of this, whether it was resources for how to learn, how to do your current job better, or resources for exploring and learning how to do other jobs that you want to go towards.”

Building a bottom-up, knowledge-sharing culture

Without an L&D team, a top-down approach makes almost no sense! It also means very few people become the bottleneck for creating that content. ORC realised that tapping into their subject matter experts would build a bottom-up approach, one that drove content creation and built a knowledge-sharing culture.

“The more that we started putting things into HowNow, we realised that our content and our resources were pretty scattered, we were utilising SharePoint, which then transitioned to Dropbox for a lot of our files.

“But having the permissions and restrictions in two different folders kind of did create barriers every time you wanted to share a document. Today, HowNow is where we’re anchoring everything related to learning.”

Capturing knowledge in HowNow Nuggets

Realising people needed that one central knowledge base, Kayshia and her team began working with managers to create team libraries in HowNow – uploading job aids and training materials as Nuggets and bringing them to the end of one single search.

But when it came to new content creation, it was all about subject matter experts and Power Users! To drive more eyes to the ORC Academy in HowNow, they began asking subject matter experts to write articles and whitepapers on the platform – sharing their technical and industry knowledge in ‘business updates’.

Variations of this were previously published on an employee website, but bringing them into a central place drove views, comments and engagement with the content. And that validation activated Power Users, who were then motivated to become advocates for the platform.

Nuggets like the one you see above can essentially be created in clicks, and ORC found this was helping Power Users share knowledge speedily and effectively – so that they could help more of their teammates.

And as more and more content was added to the ORC Academy, teammates were able to quickly share relevant links to pressing problems. What do I do in this HR situation? Which process should I follow to document this? Through Teams or email, these links are shared with personalised messages that create a human, efficient process for problem solving.

The impact: finding content in friction-free ways

In a nutshell, ORC has significantly reduced the friction for creating and finding content. And having that one place has increased engagement with the content that’s created and surfaced. Content that was previously hosted on the employee website with little engagement is now being found, seen and interacted with at a far higher level in HowNow.

“We realised that we might need to consider pulling almost everything from our other internal sites into HowNow to drive the centralization of all learning which would reduce the need for some of our other various internal sites and further reduce the friction for employees finding what they need .”

We mentioned team and department use of the platform, something that has saved managers time in driving learning and development. By setting up those teams as groups and channels in HowNow, people can easily find relevant content and everything they need to do their job well.

It provides on-demand and self-service learning that’s needed in hybrid, flexible and fast-growing teams. Rather than managers having to sit down and explain things time and again, consistent answers can be found when employees need them, saving leaders time in the process.

And their employee training needs survey shows this is a popular approach with their people, who craved and continue to crave tailored and organised learning that helps them develop.

“Training is a huge need for our company right now, and the biggest need around it is that it needs to be structured and organized and tailored. HowNow is in a really unique position to be able to support those needs.”

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