Growth is critical for every organisation, and it is the people – employees and associates who make a difference. It is their productivity, knowledge, and skills that determine success or failure.

In this age of the “gig worker” and “AI”, gone are the days when a typical employee joined an organisation, spent many months and years to become productive, and continued for a decade or more in the same company.

In today’s fast paced world, a few days of orientation or periodic training are inadequate to keep up with the information gain. With automation and AI eliminating mundane tasks, employees need superior knowledge and skills, and must learn continuously. Empowering them with “what they must know” to do their jobs well is critical for success and growth.

Fast-growing ecommerce companies now need to hire thousands of associates for sales and services, etc., in a few months. A global organisation must engage and empower thousands of channel partners and distributors with the knowledge required to represent their products and services. A tech company must ensure its large tech support team is familiar with the latest issues and customer queries. These are merely a sample of challenges organisations face today in building a workforce that can deliver results and growth.

We often hear about the “employability gap” where companies cannot find qualified people and people cannot find jobs. There are also huge inefficiencies in employee productivity and career stagnation, as people do not regularly upskill themselves over time.

The true cost of lack of knowledge and skills among employees and how it impacts business outcomes is fully not measured or understood. It is fair to say the impact is significant, and any effort towards effective learning and encouraging a culture of continuous improvement will be highly valuable for any organisation.

Challenges to people productivity

Companies nowadays face many challenges including remote work, higher churn rate, outdated training modules, changing customer needs and manager’s limited visibility into knowledge team gaps.

The questions that stand out in this scenario are many.

1. How do we measure and create consistent knowledge across the organisation?

2. How do we ensure teams are updated on recent changes and the latest information on products, processes, tech, customers, compliance, competition, etc.?

3. How to make training practical and easy for everyone?

To be productive, employees must be empowered with the knowledge and skills required to do their jobs well. This requires continuous training that is effective, engaging, and personalised.

The RapL effect

RapL helps organisations with three important steps:

1. Making learning easy, effective, and measurable

• Microlearning on mobile devices for just a few minutes a day
• Reinforcement that is personalized, rather than one-time learning that is quickly forgotten
• Provide a knowledge map of the organisation (visibility of gaps and progress areas for each manager)

2. Identifying individual knowledge gaps and fixing them continuously

• RapL continuously identifies and addresses individual knowledge gaps
• Promotes self-awareness of knowledge gaps, thereby motivating individuals to learn

3. Creating a culture of continuous learning and upskilling

• Personalised for each team/individual based on their skill gaps, level
• Automated learning paths for systematically improving knowledge across the organisation
• Real-time updates to ensure everyone is kept up-to-date
• Readily accessible reference materials
• Leaderboards and rewards to make learning fun and engaging

Driving productivity and business outcomes

The first step to building a next-gen workforce is to empower employees with the essential knowledge and skills. This helps achieve consistent high performance, through effective, continuous learning and training.

The real productivity gain, however, can only come when the learning outcomes are mapped to business outcomes.

When leaders have visibility on how knowledge gaps impact their business, it is imperative to take action and measure the ROI of these next-gen learning and engagement tools. To truly empower employees, they must be aware of real-time issues, presented with personalised actionable insights, and measured on real, high impact outcomes.

RapL has helped various organisations in optimising employee productivity. A retail store manager had to spend many hours and work night shifts at their airport stores to onboard and train new employees. With RapL, she was able to ease the on-boarding process for new hires and enable consistent automated upskilling and fast ramp-up of any new employee who joined the store. She saved significant time and established a productive workforce with consistent sales outcomes and high customer satisfaction. In another example, RapL helped a tech company’s support team overcome challenges like poor product knowledge and inconsistency in addressing problems by improving their understanding of products, tech support process and domain knowledge, leading to a 30% reduction in escalations to the engineering team.

RapL’s aim has consistently been to empower employees so that companies can drive and improve their business outcomes. The team noticed that managers often don’t understand the potential of their team members. To that end, RapL provides an easy to use, secure, and scalable SaaS platform to enable information flows and insights to every employee, manager, and associate.

Cohort 11 of NetApp Excellerator

RapL is a part of the latest cohort of NetApp Excellerator, and the programme has helped the team in various ways - from mentoring to fine-tuning their GTM and growth strategy. RapL provides a B2B enterprise SaaS solution on the cloud that is heavily data-driven, and manages a lot of content where security, scale, and reliability on the cloud are important. As the team scales, it believes that NetApp solutions are likely to play a role in these areas.

To empower your employees and improve business outcomes and connect with RapL,