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Your employees spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information that you likely have already spent time and money to give them. On top of that, they burn up tons of hours of productivity by continuously searching for the same answers over and over.

The bigger, and more distributed your workforce, the bigger the problem is, the bigger the productivity bite, and the more frustrations your employees are enduring.

You could send them back to the classroom to learn it all over again. But they’ll just proceed to forget most of it. And they’ll be back on Google and YouTube filling in their knowledge gaps with unsanctioned, uncertain–and often dead wrong–information.

Instead of sending them back to the classroom, you should send the classroom to them, essentially putting the power of the classroom at their fingertips. You need to give them something that allows them to keep on top of the important information needed for their jobs, and do so in a manner that’s efficient, easy, and up-to-date.

In short, your workers need job aids.

Specifically, they need integrated job aids. This is where all of the common processes, new procedures, and questions – both those that you know they are asking and insight on those you don’t – are put into the context of workers’ daily work and processes. This will likely present in the form of an easily downloaded mobile app that the worker can use and have confidence that they will get the right and best answers every time.

Providing your workers a set of integrated job aids like this is more than just a good way to be a helpful employer and trainer, it’s a smart move that will deliver real value to the entire company:

Keep workers constantly updated

The reason your workers are Googling how to do their jobs is because the training manuals lying around their workspace are often out-of-date. And even if they are kept updated, the format and layout can make them difficult to use for any real practical needs. On the other hand, workplace signage is often too simplistic or generic to be able to answer the sort of “what if” questions workers often have.

Integrated job aids can push a common set of instructions and answers to your entire distributed workforce from a central place, making it so much easier to keep things up-to-date. And delivering the aids in a format that workers can easily interact with by touch, talk, or text on their mobile phones, ensures that they are always available and ready to use.

Dynamically deliver training

If you knew that a worker was looking for certain kinds of information or asking specific questions to help him do his job, you may decide that he is in desperate need of supplemental, or even remedial, training. Integrated job aids not only can alert you to these needs, they can also provide a ready platform for delivering the necessary training in a manner that’s easy for the worker to access without having to ever be taken off of the job.

Further, with integrated job aids fully deployed, the training team now has a way to deliver any new skill training across the organization or direct to specific job functions that may require specialized training.

Pinpoint trouble and blindspots

Integrated job aids can do even more than just give workers the information they need to do their jobs. From notifying managers about which employees are missing key training modules to curating and cueing up the latest inquiries that workers are posing, integrated job aids can help managers pinpoint trouble spots and alert them to questions and issues that might otherwise be hidden and go unaddressed.

For example, with integrated job aids, a manager can quickly spot problem workers who take longer to do a procedure or who are clearly not following the procedure and just “clicking through” it. Now, the problem could well be a bad employee or it could be the way the procedure is written, but data from the job aid raises the flag to enable the manager to dig in deeper. In this way, the job aids are as much for improving management as they are about aiding the frontline worker.

Give workers the right answers

Without integrated job aids, chances are pretty good that your workforce may depend as much–if not more–on what Google or YouTube presents to them than on what you have set as official training protocols. In some situations, it contributes to the existing problem of wasted productivity. But in other situations, it may represent a breach of protocols that could endanger the worker, the product, and others.

However, a well-curated, integrated job aid could ensure that your workforce has the correct answer to the questions they have, when and where they need it–complete with graphics, illustrations, and video clips for clarity on even the most complex procedures.

Presumably, you know what workers need to do their jobs. In fact, you may have even trained them on exactly how to do it. So, you are in the position to not only give workers the right answers, you can give it to them even faster with integrated job aids

If you think that it is time to invest in training that can save your company time and money, DaVinix has tools to help you build integrated job aids. To learn more, visit davinix.com/why-davinix.