3 Reasons You Don’t Need Real-Time Enablement

Raise your hand if you oversee (or influence!) software purchase decisions for your company. 🙋‍♀️

Keep your hand up if you’ve given a tool the green light without considering all the processes and people you’d need to enable to make that investment worthwhile…and have had to pick up the pieces when: 

🫠 New software makes people’s jobs harder, not easier 
💀 The underlying business processes causing your biggest business problems persist
🙅 End users refuse to lean into the change or self-serve with the training provided   
🆘 Your IT help desk can’t keep up with the volume of support tickets 
😬 It’s clear the ROI isn’t there (from a product usage or a process adoption standpoint)

This kind of failure to launch happens all the time. Particularly when IT, operations, training, L&D, and enablement teams take a traditional approach to software training and don’t embrace Real-Time Enablement when rolling out new tools. 👀

But maybe your company *is* seeing success with status quo software training. Maybe you don’t have a lot of ambivalent adopters in your midst. And maybe you don’t need Real-Time Enablement at all.

Here are three ways to know for sure. 👇

1. Every tool you buy is worth the cost

Real-Time Enablement isn’t going to do much for your company if:

💪🏼 You’re already getting great ROI on every tool in your tech stack
🤷🏽 Driving digital adoption isn’t important to you
🧡 Your employees love reading dense software training guides and watching long videos
👌🏿 Executing key processes in your most essential software is already brainless
🏆 You can clearly measure the operational efficiency achieved by a piece of software

2. Your team embraces distractions

There’s also no compelling reason to move away from traditional software training if:

😬 Your eNPS would nosedive if you eliminated mandatory workshops and trainings
🙏 Your operations team loves answering the same questions over and over
👍🏽 Everyone’s into breaking flow, context-switching, and waiting for answers
🚫 Cross-functional teams don’t need to carve out more time to be strategic
🍽️ There’s a big appetite for information overload
🔎 Process improvement is a low priority

3. Your team is the definition of operational excellence

We’d also suggest putting a pin in the Real-Time Enablement conversation if you’re firing on all cylinders and:

🕺 None of your end users are resistant to change and self-service
🤙 Process knowledge is easy to trust and discover
✅ Everyone’s finding what they need in your knowledge base or learning management system
💥 It’s easy to show the impact of processes you’ve documented
💡 You know who’s following your standard operating procedures (and where they’re getting stuck)

However.

If you *can’t* confirm that your company is using every tool in your tech stack to its full potential, there’s no one who would benefit from more focused time, and you’re already operationally excellent in every sense of the word…

…teaching end users to learn software while they use it with Real-Time Enablement may be transformative for you and your career. 

We’ll leave you with:

1. A case study that shows how switching to Real-Time Enablement helped a health consortium roll out a new ERP to 1,400 employees in 27 locations across southeast Alaska—without boarding a single boat or seaplane to conduct in-person training. 🏆 
2. A few more indications that now may be the best time to champion a different kind of internal software training. 👇