Digital Productivity and Behaviours

Office Applications and Management/Leadership Styles

At QA we often (very often) teach learners about new functionality. We might work with employees new to a system (e.g. OneDrive) or a system that is new to the organisation (e.g. Microsoft Power Platform) for example. We might help people master the functionality of an application they already work with (e.g. mastering shortcuts on Outlook can save time every day, once learnt in a few hours on one day). Few of us use the full functionality of any system we use.

As technology plays an increasing part in our working lives, -how we work is deeply affected by our natural leadership styles and how we vary them in different situations combined with technology. If, for example, you are naturally well organised – (your inbox is always professionally managed, your folders neat and tidy and so always ready to find what you need), you will interact with Outlook in a unique way from a colleague who can cope with a less tidy structure and indeed needs less ‘organisation’ to remain naturally creative and still productive. All people matter.

Both types of people can benefit from using the same technology in similar ways (e.g. to aid collaboration) and in different ways (e.g. to accommodate their personal organising styles). Both personas can become more productive and more creative.

Our client solution

The Managing, Leading and Personal Effectiveness team collaborated with the Digital Productivity and Office Applications team, both at QA to take a deeper dive into a certain application. The client wanted to go beyond standard training and give its workers a boost that took their diversity and context into account.

Working in partnership with the client, we generated a series of scenarios based on different personas working in different situations. How could the functionality adapt? How could the personas adapt to make the most of the functionality? Learning was therefore contextualised for the client and to the learners. The design allowed for a range of relationships with the technology, each productive and creative. Diversity was allowed to come to the foreground where it deserves to be.

Value of Learning Transfer (VoLT)

Different clients have different approaches to measuring impact. In this sort of case, the impact starts within the design through the partnership with the client to work on the personas and the scenarios. The design is, well, designed to have an impact through the context-specific nature of the training. Confidence maps can be easily used to determine the effectiveness of the training including the longer-term impact as we ask will learners have more confidence adapting to technology (any technology) in the future, and be more curious about its ability to adapt to their needs.

Contact us if you wish for your Office Applications training to have a behavioural overlay to give it more meaning and purpose. We will develop bespoke personas to wrap around the technical training.

*Please note this is a generic case study drawn from one or more client solutions, incorporating ongoing CI/CD to create a case that can be related to and which avoids commercial confidentiality issues.