Writing digestible content can prevent your meticulous creations from getting slapped with the dreaded TL;DR (too long, didn’t read).
Content producers have now adopted this acronym to denote content summaries that showcase key information. Similarly, Google’s featured snippets skip the fluff and provide concise answers immediately.
However, the audiences’ growing impatience and short attention spans aren’t the only incentives to cut content and messages short.
There’s a dire need to keep things brief when frontline workers are your target audience.
The content needs to be sharp but never incorrect or incomplete; communication channels must be reliable and fast, and the messages must be concise and relevant to current workers’ demands.
The solution?
Go mobile-first and adapt your content and messages to mobile phones as mediums.
In this article, we’ll show you how to produce digestible, bite-sized information optimised for chat-based communication, which your team members will thank you for.
What Does “Digestible Content” Mean for Deskless Workforce?
Nutritionists advise taking small bites and chewing thoroughly to aid digestion. In the context of employee engagement, this notion is a great counsel in your approach to producing content for the frontline workforce.
Much like a digestible meal, digestible content is best consumed in small bites. Let’s explore the concept of bite-sized learning.
Bite-sized learning (or microlearning) is a method that breaks educational content down into small pieces of information. These information bites are much easier to read and memorise, making the learning content more digestible.
Bite-sized learning helps tackle complex subject matter in several ways:
- Learners aren’t intimidated by the amount or difficulty of content they need to take in;
- Staff in training is encouraged to learn and revise every day;
- Concise information will decrease attention burnout and engagement fatigue;
- Learning materials are more flexible and easy to access on the go: during breaks, commutes, or in the waiting rooms.
This makes microlearning perfect for the average deskless worker.
Frontline staff have no time or means to browse, skim walls of text, or decipher long-winded messages.
The unique learning and communication needs stem from the urgency of their working environment. Machine operators can’t divert their attention to look things up and risk severe injuries or a production halt. Retail workers need to provide assistance and information to the customers quickly or risk bad reviews and profit loss.
Adapting materials and delivery styles to a digestible format facilitates easier comprehension by deskless workers, enabling the application of knowledge from day one.
Bite-sized learning content should be an integral part of onboarding and pre-boarding for deskless employees. For best results, you must continue to empower your frontline team members with apt learning resources, easily accessible at their place of work.
Why Exceptional Chat-Based Content Matters to Deskless Staff
Learning to provide the frontline workforce with digestible, chat-based content will reward you and your new staff with many benefits:
- Providing a great onboarding experience — Feeling appreciated and supported from day one decreases the chances of employees having second thoughts, workplace anxiety, and a bad attitude towards work.
- Increasing employee engagement — Chat-based learning and communication are more direct than their counterparts such as emails and other static knowledge bases. Sharp communication bursts encourage staff to get involved and take less time away from their work.
- Boosting staff productivity from the first day at work — With rich learning resources conveniently shaped for mobile learning, it won’t take new team members long before they master new skills.
- Reducing the possibility of mistakes in the workplace — Chat-based content is loved for its fast delivery. Having accurate information at hand at all times can make up for knowledge gaps and minimise the impact of low work capabilities.
Choosing the Perfect Medium for Delivering Digestible, Bite-Sized Content
Computerless work can be tough: keyboards are easier to use, and larger devices provide many powerful functionalities that mobile devices still can’t handle. In some instances, mobile phones can’t compete.
However, the reality of deskless work implies that mobile phones truly are the best solution for learning and communication.
Computers are bulky and expensive, and the return on their investment when geared towards the frontline industry is minute.
On the other hand, mobile phones are a staple of everyday life; they are cheaper, optimised for native means of communication — and entirely sufficient for most frontline roles.
How to Create Content Perfect for Chat-Based Communication and Mobile Learning
Duolingo has mastered microlearning via mobile. If you aren’t already using it to learn a new language, let the persistent owl guide you through a course, so you can see a perfect example of mobile microlearning in action!
Like any other amazing mobile learning resource, Duolingo checks all of these boxes, and so should you:
In curating an amazing mobile learning resource, there’s a few components you must nail:
- Create clear and concise content — Frontline workers want quick access to precise information, so be sure that the content you’re putting out leaves no space for second thoughts.
- Keep the messages short, coherent, and relevant — It shouldn’t take a thick paragraph of text to get the point across. Remember - TLDR! To keep team members engaged, communicate clearly, with brief and precise messages.
- Cover one topic at a time — When creating mobile and chat-based learning resources, remain focused on one topic at a time to avoid confusion and workplace mistakes.
- Top-up information with additional learning resources — By nature of its sharpness, chat-based learning content is sparse. Be sure to include useful links with in-depth materials in your messages, so deskless workers can access them and learn at their convenience.
- Personalise the content according to individual needs — New team members will go through various stages of onboarding at different paces. At work, they’ll need specific support, according to their roles. Keep this in mind when producing content, and provide only content which is useful and relevant.
- Keep accessibility in mind — With the limited time and screen space you have at your disposal, make sure to display your messages in a way that doesn’t require much scrolling.
- Collect feedback and iterate as you go — Frontline staff are first to experience many of the mishaps and difficulties at the workplace. Take their feedback as a valuable intel, and take it seriously. Deskless workers have notoriously high turnover rates, and not feeling heard is one of the key reasons they bounce to another employer.
How Mercu Leverages Chat-Based Communication to Hire, Onboard, Train, and Enhance Workforce Retention
From the team member perspective, everything happens within a familiar Whatsapp chat-based ecosystem that takes no learning to master.
The platform is equally as intuitive for HR. From a single platform, management can create content, collect information and derive actionable insights with little uplift required. Mercu’s platform enables seamless team communication, engagement, knowledge-base querying and more.
Automated Onboarding
Mercu lets you onboard new team members twice as fast by:
- Creating automated onboarding workflows and templates for each onboarding stage;
- Automating information requests up-front for super effective pre-boarding;
- Provide onboarding materials and self-serve learning resources on autopilot;
Digestible Learning Modules for Training and Development
We work hard to hone chat-based learning to perfection.
With Mercu, our platform encourages the creation of digestible content by breaking down each message into modules and blocks. Communicate knowledge through text, photos, videos and files, to make it simple for team members to digest information.
Test, quiz and survey employees to facilitate their learning, and review analytics to iterate your approach to training.
Increase the Engagement With Frictionless Feedback Loops
Without the need to download new apps and logins, we’ve removed friction from the equation.
As a result, employee mobile engagement grew four times — and we use it to gather important employee feedback.
Consequently, high Whatsapp engagement rates can help you discover what irks your employees and address it in time, before they churn.
A fifth of employee turnover happens as early as the first month at the new company, which speaks volumes about the importance of employee feedback.
Helping Hand Labour recognised how powerful Whatsapp automation can be; since working with us, they saved hours of time weekly on onboarding and admin overhead — which helped them improve customer satisfaction!
Book a demo, and we'll help you empower your deskless staff and HR with chat-based solutions for hiring, onboarding, and training!
