A challenge in a working day with a constant battle of meetings and training is to make them relevant, effective, and engaging. However, it is easier said than done, and unfortunately, you sometimes end up at meetings where you don't really have a clue why you are there, and in the worst case, you have also quite quickly forgotten what was said at the meeting/training.

Ensure the right conditions for engagement

Most people probably recognize themselves on some level in the description above, and we hope that you can be inspired by the Month's guide, which deals with that particular challenge. Because you need to think and plan a little to achieve the desired commitment and conditions to be able to get something out of a meeting or training. It is rarely about reluctance when an employee is not sufficiently engaged or familiar with a meeting, but rather that many things require attention during the working day. You simply need to make it easier for employees to get a handle on the situation and provide the right conditions for commitment. Some who thought about this were the NCC before its annual meeting called "Lärandemöte." The meeting is a strategically important meeting that HR/Competence development has with all managers within production in Sweden. Before the meeting, a nicely composed guide was therefore created and sent with the invitation. The purpose of the guide was to:

• Clarify the purpose of the meeting/training
• Clarify the agenda for the meeting/training
• Höja kunskapsnivån inför mötet/utbildningen
• Ensure a common level of knowledge before the meeting/training
• Inspire before the meeting/training
• Provide support after the meeting/training

After the meeting, a meeting recording was also embedded in the guide itself. The guide thus became support afterward both for looking back at the content and at the meeting recording itself. Those who could not attend at the time also had the opportunity to catch up on what was said, as the guide served as a summary of the meeting.

Bonus! Be inspired by how NCC works with daily learning

A bonus for this Guide of the Month is that the content of the guide provides inspiration about how NCC works with learning in everyday life, where they are inspired by the 70-20-10 model, among other things. The 70-20-10 model is a theory that describes when and how learning takes place in working life. The theory says that about 10% of what you know in your workplace you know thanks to formal courses you have gone through; about 20% you can thanks to help and guidance from colleagues; around 70% you can thanks to your routine and experience - that is, learning by doing. A conclusion that can be drawn from that is that you should focus on providing good support when an employee is performing their tasks rather than on courses as preparation for performing their tasks.

This is what Mara Andersson and Anna Iversen at NCC say about their work with learning in everyday life:

Working with daily learning and a well-thought-out learning process is an issue that we prioritize highly at NCC, and we work continuously to create the conditions for a learning culture. It is about encouraging learning and creating learning habits that suit the specific employee. We want employees to ask themselves the question: what do I want to get better at, gain knowledge about, and develop in?

We strongly believe that employees stay curious about the world around them, asking questions, exploring new topics, and seeking new experiences. This helps the employee stay engaged and motivated, which is good fuel for building learning. We also understand that learning does not have to be formal or structured. Learning can happen in many different ways, and the most important thing is to stay curious and open to new experiences.

NCC Guides (InfoCaption with us at NCC) are an important support in the learning process. Some of the success factors are that our employees can take part in the knowledge that is divided into reasonably large parts and that can be consumed as needed (one-off or recurring). We also work with several ways to access the guides: the guides can be accessed both via the search function on the intranet or via the Guideportalen.

Click here to view the guide used by NCC during their meeting "Lärandemöte 2023" (in Swedish)

NCC receives the Guide of the Month award

Every month we at InfoCaption appoint the Guide of the Month - a guide that we want to highlight a little extra because of the value it creates in the organization. As a thank you to the person(s) who created the Guide of the Month, we donate SEK 1,000 monthly to the organization Hand in Hand Sweden, which fights poverty by creating more jobs in vulnerable countries. Hand in Hand works with the "help to self-help" model, which is in line with InfoCaption's own mission "to make it easier for employees to help each other."

We at Team InfoCaption think that NCC's work in creating the conditions for simplicity with the help of reusable templates and searchable portals is completely in line with our mission. We think that is worth celebrating.

Do you want to learn more about how you can create simple guides that make a big difference in your business?