Having a fantastic corporate learning platform means nothing if your people aren’t engaging with it. If your organization is like most, they probably aren’t.
Statistics show that adoption and engagement are the two biggest challenges that organizations face when they seek to roll out or refresh corporate learning opportunities. Most get an adoption rate that is between 15 and 20 percent, meaning organizations with 10,000 employees have — at most — 2,000 who take the time to set up an account.
When it comes to engagement, the numbers are even worse, with active engagement rates for enterprise audiences standing between two and five percent. While 2,000 may set up an account, only 500 out of 10,000 employees are actually using the training with any regularity.
While those kinds of figures are the norm, it doesn’t mean your organization needs to settle for them. There are ways to drive higher adoption and engagement.
The success of Threads
Threads, the text-based social network that Meta rolled out on July 5, 2023, set a record by surpassing 100 million downloads in just five days. To give that some context, consider that the AI phenomenon ChatGPT needed two months to gather a 100 million user base, and TikTok needed nine months. When you consider that Threads was not available in the European Union at the time of its launch due to regulatory issues, its download numbers become even more remarkable.
For leaders that are eager to learn, the success of Threads provides an engaging study on what it takes to achieve record-breaking adoption rates. The following five factors, each of which played a key role in attracting users to Threads, could be used to significantly boost the success of any organization’s corporate learning efforts.
1. Give people access to real and influential people
As social creatures, we love social media. It satisfies a deep need we all have to connect with and learn from the community around us. We spend time there because we appreciate the insights and inspiration offered by people who are living the same lives and dealing with the same struggles.
When social media brings us into contact with influential people who wield a certain level of social authority, all the better. Threads provided a way to connect with both community and key influencers. Many who were considered Twitter’s top celebrities, including Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, were early Thread’s adopters.
People joined Threads in record numbers because it gave them an opportunity to hear what others, including influential people, were saying about the topics that mattered to them. Learning management systems that give users the same opportunity will attract record numbers of adopters as well. Traditional systems fail to create impactful levels of innate curiosity because they rely on sterile content and outdated methods.
2. Open the door to back-and-forth interaction
Like so many other social platforms, people joined Threads because of the promise of interaction. While there are definitely those who simply lurk in the social shadows, most users appreciate the back-and-forth interaction that is central to social media functionality.
When it comes to facilitating effective corporate learning, back-and-forth interaction is king. First, it drives engagement by giving users the opportunity to contribute and participate, rather than just spectate. With back-and-forth interaction, learning is a conversation and not a lecture, allowing users to be seen and heard.
Traditional learning platforms fail to take advantage of interaction. They utilize a one-way approach that essentially seeks to shove content down the user’s throat. Instead of engaging, participating, and contributing, users are expected only to consume and complete. Is it any wonder they don’t want to engage?
3. Provide the type of content that people already consume
Threads, like some other social platforms, offers bite-sized, quick content that is easily accessed via its mobile app. Limiting its posts to 500 characters and its videos to five minutes works because that is the kind of content people like.
It’s time for corporate learning to wake up to that reality. Long-form videos that take 30 to 40 minutes to watch engage no one. To drive adoption and engagement, learning platforms need to be easy to download, easy to access, easy to navigate, and focused on providing content that is easy to digest.
4. Leverage the influence of organizational leaders
As I spent time in Threads in the days following its launch, I was blown away by the number of times I saw Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri engage in random conversations with anyone and everyone. It seemed like they were replying to most of the threads that I was seeing in my feed!
When planning the launch campaign for your next corporate learning initiative — which is something you should definitely have — take a cue from Zuck and Threads and leverage your corporate leadership to build excitement and drive engagement. Getting a network of leaders on board early on and promoting their presence can use FOMO to trigger higher levels of adoption.
5. Draw from your existing network to build early momentum
Odds are you don’t have 2.35 billion people to tap for quick adoption like Threads had in the Instagram user base. You do, however, have an existing employee base. By exploiting the connections they already have to your existing enterprise systems, you can kickstart the adoption of a new learning system when you launch.
The key to driving higher levels of adoption and engagement is embracing a new mindset. The traditional models that rely on generic content that is irrelevant and inaccessible no longer deliver (if they ever did). As Threads shows, a platform that provides the right content in the right setting with opportunities to connect with the right people is the kind of platform that people get excited about engaging with and rush to adopt.
