“I have a productivity problem – how do I solve it?”
“U.S. workers have gotten way less productive,” the Washington Post writes recently. “In the first half of 2022, productivity … plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
If you’ve noticed this, you’re not alone. From “quiet quitting” to the “Great Resignation,” members of the workforce are reevaluating their relationship to productivity, and often not in a way that benefits companies. Often since the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re joining the gig economy in ever-larger numbers – including freelance work for themselves – where they have more autonomy.
How to resist this without doubling down on the issues that have led to slowdowns in productivity? If you treat productivity as something to be squeezed out of the workforce from the top down, you’re not going to solve this problem – you might just make it worse. The workforce is tired of being endlessly micromanaged. They prefer autonomy.
At the same time, workforces are becoming more and more distributed, as well as more and more interconnected, with individuals more than ever dependent on technology to guide their productivity. Even in the gig economy, contractors rely on apps to connect them with buyers for their services. So what are modern organizations to do? How should they think about the workforce in a way that’s adequate to the challenge of lower productivity? The answer isn’t merely “engagement,” “gamification,” or “learning management,” as some would suggest, because it’s not clear that these would be enough if the tasks in which the workforce is engaged are not calculated to improve productivity.
Yet experts are now excited about a model that goes beyond these solutions, while at the same time containing them all. They call it “performance enablement.”
“What is performance enablement and why should I embrace it?”
In spring 2022, experts at SHRM wrote an article about performance enablement as a “solution for the great resignation.” While SHRM might have been writing about traditional, office-based companies, rather than the distributed workforce, it’s worthwhile investigating how performance enablement as a paradigm helps organizations deal with the productivity slumps they’re facing today – and might be facing for a while yet.
So what is performance enablement, anyway, and why should companies be embracing it?
Performance enablement is in many ways about enabling productivity and autonomy in the workforce at the same time, hand in hand. To the extent that the workforce becomes more productive, they also feel more autonomous, more in control of their destiny and potential – rather than in older, outdated forms of “top-down” enablement, which have proved counterproductive as phenomena like quiet quitting and the Great Resignation have taken hold.
Rather than the “top-down” paradigm – exemplified by Learning Management Systems and Learning Experience Platforms – performance enablement brings forth results through the actions and abilities of the individual herself. It doesn’t say, “Do this because your organization wants you to.” It says, “Do this activity to reach your sales goals for the week.”
As you might imagine, with digital technology being so key to activating distributed workforce potential – how else can you engage productivity for a geographically dispersed workforce? – “digital transformation” is the delivery channel for performance enablement.
Whereas prior forms of workforce experience technology (again, LMSes, LXPs) merely helped to “develop” the workforce, in the sense of enhancing skills or knowledge, performance enablement technology leverages this development to improve business results across an array of industries. Furthermore, the workforce experiences this improvement as something vital to their own personal progress, whether that be longer-term career movement or concrete, day-to-day sales.
What kinds of businesses is performance enablement technology meant for?
Performance enablement technology is useful for any kind of business whose profits, culture, and viability are grounded in their workforce. Today’s companies, broadly speaking, have been buffeted by the winds of change, and more is expected.
From “quiet quitting” to the Great Resignation, from the fallout from the pandemic to an unexpected drop in productivity, companies of all stripes have faced issues relating to their labor force. The rise of gig work shows that people don’t want to just be “told what to do” anymore. They want a workforce experience that’s meaningful to them as individuals, and that’s centralized in a single app. They expect efficiency, simplicity, and flexibility.
For comparison’s sake, there’s a reason why a company like DuoLingo is considered the gold standard for language learning enablement. They don’t just provide a passive language-learning experience, but actively form the user’s experience based on her specific needs and progress so far. They provide smart notifications that matter for the user at the right time. You might say that DuoLingo is performance enablement for language learners.
Likewise, Uber’s app helped launch the modern gig economy. As everyone knows, it allows drivers to onboard, drive, and earn all in one app.
The answer, then, is not to invest in technology that offers a one-size-fits-all approach saying, “Do this because the company says so,” but a dynamic, living experience that says, “Do this because it benefits you: it suits your goals.”
What is Rallyware’s role in performance enablement?
Rallyware is a market leader and a trailblazer in performance enablement for the distributed workforce. After coining this term in 2018, we began helping large organizations implement performance enablement. At the same time, we noticed many other vendors embracing performance enablement in some shape or form.
As mentioned, Rallyware is performance enablement for the distributed workforce. In fact, the workforce in general increasingly is distributed, as workers embrace non-traditional arrangements like gig work and independent contracting.
“Distributed workforce,” of course, means workforces that are distributed across time zones, regions, facilities – everything from gig work to retail. Because of its structure, the distributed workforce needs to be engaged and made productive in an organic, bottom-up manner.
This workforce is emblematic of so much of the general workforce today, in that structurally, it can’t be managed in a top-down way. This is the digital age, a time of dispersal, autonomy, new work arrangements. Even if we’re talking about retail, if an associate feels they’re being micromanaged, they can just quit and get started at another store – a large contributor to the churn retail has seen since the pandemic. Instead, performance has to be enabled “from below,” from the individual themselves.
One of Rallyware’s core innovations in performance enablement is the smart notification or smart trigger, which shows the right individual the right activity to perform at the right time, leading to the right behaviors.
Without getting too technical, we’ll say that these notifications are intelligently triggered by events, surfacing for the end-user – for instance, a retail associate – the item that’s going to matter most to them at the moment it’s going to matter the most.
This notification is going to be tailored to the individual’s progress and goals, and enhance their productivity. But it’s also going to be targeting the business’s core KPIs and needs at this moment. As the associate’s performance increased, so did her store’s. Productivity and profit rise in tandem, driven by smart notifications.
Again: not, “Do this because your company says so,” but rather, “Do this because it will help your progress toward your goals.”
What does Rallyware do?
Rallyware is an all-in-one platform encompassing multiple modules. That is to say, with Rallyware, you’re looking at a single platform that connects several core solutions. Data travels freely between them, maximizing the personalization for each and every activity that each and every user performs. The more modules a company is making use of, the richer their workforce’s experience is going to become.
Rallyware’s all-in-one platform drives and reinforces the right behaviors to enhance productivity, sales, customer service, product knowledge, and more – all grounded in the right activity to the right person at the right time, for the right behaviors. When we’re talking about Rallyware, we’re talking about modern technology for the modern, distributed workforce.
Quickly, let’s break down that all-in-one structure and dive into some of the core modules and experiences in the platform. Customers can pick and choose which solutions they use, or they can use all of them in a single experience where data flows freely from tool to tool, creating the most personalized experience possible.
Learning & Development
Learning & Development refers to learning tasks that help to upskill the distributed workforce, whether the end user is a retail associate, direct selling distributor, independent contractor, or any number of variations. These tasks are constructed to improve the individual’s productivity – not just help them learn.
For instance, does a retail associate need to learn in detail about an inventory item – say, a cardigan sweater – that’s been stuck in inventory for weeks? The platform will send her a smart notification, such as a training video she can watch on her downtime.
Rallyware calibrates the learning to the store’s goals, and the associate’s goals – for example, to make more in commission. But this is even better when used in sync with Incentives & Recognition.
Incentives & Recognition
Incentives & Recognition involves the visualization and rewarding of individual progress. It tantalizes and engages, showing the end user how far they’ve come toward their goals and how far they have to go, showing them – at the most actionable moment – how they can reach those goals.
Let’s say our same retail associate wants to reach $500 in commission for the week. Rallyware will send her a smart notification letting her know that by selling a few of those cardigans, she can reach her goals.
Multi-Tiered Communications
At a time of geographic dispersal – whether we’re talking about sales reps, associates, or other members of the distributed workforce – Rallyware’s communications tools help large organizations stay aligned.
For example, if corporate HQ wants each retail franchise to begin greeting customers as “guests,” they can send that directive instantly to the entire workforce – or just to store managers to communicate it to their associates. The communications are customizable, to fit organizational practices and needs.
Opportunity Management
For any business, the goal has to go beyond one-time customers to loyal, repeat clientele. If an Uber rider uses the rideshare app only once, what does that matter? But if that person sees Uber as part of their lifestyle, something they return to continually, that’s going to make an impact.
Opportunity Management is thus a key piece in business vitality, helping guide the workforce as they seek to retain customers and make repeat sales. As a last example, let’s say that our associate from earlier gets a new catalog with fall offerings. Now, she thinks to herself, I have a customer who’d love to see this – how can I send it to her? Rallyware lets her find that past customer and send her a pre-scripted message with the catalog attached. Done: key clientele reengaged.
Conclusion: Why Rallyware’s Performance Enablement Model Matters
Distributed workforces are growing and changing, from gig work to retailers who are reinventing the frontline experience. For reasons we discussed above, performance enablement is the paradigm that matters for companies with a distributed workforce who want to appeal to the workforce with a robust digital experience, rather than missing out on lost productivity.
Learning & Development, Incentives & Recognition, Communications, and Opportunity Management tools truly make performance enablement come alive. Robust performance enablement requires that the platform uses an individual’s every business-related decision, interaction, and achievement to drive performance upward. At the same time, on top of these modules, any number of integrations with other systems will only enhance the real-time performance data that Rallyware uses to “guide” the workforce’s productivity in a bottom-up fashion.
That’s exactly what Rallyware does, with every business action helping the platform guide the end-user in becoming ever-more motivated and productive. Precisely the right activity – based on the richest possible performance data – gets delivered to the right person at the right time. That helps the distributed workforce feel that their workforce experience is uniquely meaningful and responsive to them, which raises performance across the board.
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