Webinar Recap: How Yammer Uses Mindflash For Training

On Thursday, May 9, Mindflash hosted a webinar to discuss how Yammer uses Mindflash to conduct training. It was a very informative webinar, and I thought I would recap some of the highlights so you can learn how to use Mindflash and Yammer together to develop and deliver training in your organization. In this webinar, Yammer discusses three challenges that it needed to overcome, what they were looking for in an e-learning authoring tool, and how Yammer actually uses Mindflash to conduct training for employees and customers.

Yammer is an enterprise social network used by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies to improve team collaboration, empower and engage employees, and overall just connect different parts of companies together. Because of its rapid growth, Yammer needed to think differently about how to develop and deliver training. The following challenges needed to be overcome.

Challenges

On-boarding New Employees: Yammer was hiring a lot of people to support its growth, primarily in frequent, small groups. Live classroom training was not always possible, so Yammer needed to find an alternative delivering platform.

On-boarding New Customers: In order to ensure its customers were successful, Yammer wanted to help them learn how to get the most out of Yammer. It needed a solution to quickly develop and deliver training to its customers who were all over the world.

Global Reach: Speaking of all over the world, Yammer needed to training employees and customers who were located globally, whether in one of their offices or out in the field.

Fast Moving Business – Yammer has product releases on a weekly basis, so the learning team needed a solution so they could develop content fast enough to keep up with the speed of these releases. Keeping employees and customers current on new product features was critical.

What Yammer Found

Ease of Use: One of the things Yammer was looking for in an e-learning authoring tool was ease of use. If Yammer’s learning team was going to keep up with the fast pace of hiring, customer growth, and product releases, they needed an authoring tool that was easy to use. They found Mindflash to suit this need. When compared to other e-learning authoring tools, Yammer found that when a new trainer joined the team, the new trainer learned Mindflash very quickly and was able to develop course very fast. In fact, Mindflash has stats that show that 63% of new Mindflash customers publish a course within one day of signing up. That is a testament to how easy Mindflash is to use.

Ease of Maintenance: As fast as Yammer releases product changes, maintaining existing training content is critical. Sound familiar? Yammer found that editing existing training content by removing slides, changing slide orders, editing existing content, and then publishing the changes was fast and easy. This allows the learning team to keep up with the speed of product releases.

Blended and Social Learning: Because Yammer is an enterprise social network, they are inherently social and wanted to deliver training that took advantage of a blend of formal, self-paced learning and social learning. Yammer found that by using Mindflash in combination with the Yammer platform, they could deliver a formal training course, have people pause in the middle of a course to participate in discussions, activities, and exercises in Yammer, and then resume the e-learning course that was developed in Mindflash.

The Results

The results demonstrate the power of using Mindflash and Yammer together to develop and deliver training. For example, Yammer now supports training for all of its employees and over 1,000 customers with four global certification programs. Yammer also transformed existing PowerPoint training content to blended learning experiences that can be used to train people no matter where they are in the world. Finally, the Yammer learning team continues to receive rave reviews from participants and from new trainers who join the team who absolutely love using Mindflash and Yammer to develop and deliver training.

If Yammer’s story resonated with you, I recommend you watch this webinar. You will learn how Yammer uses Mindflash, and you will learn tons of valuable tips and tricks for using Mindflash and the Yammer platform together.

If you are using Mindflash and Yammer in your organization, tell us how you are using it. We’d live to hear your stories in the comments below.

Bill Cushard, author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer, is a human performance technologist (HPT) with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning organizations in start-up and hyper-growth organizations like E*TRADE, the Knowland Group, and Allonhill. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

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