Are you struggling with getting your employees to use your SOPs? The use of instructional design when creating standard operating procedures helps get users' attention and engage with this kind of content.
You may not even realize it, but if the information is made available without any kind of learning structure, you’ll hardly get anyone engaged with it. That’s when instructional design comes in. It’s a technique to optimize learning and facilitate the absorption of knowledge.
In this read, we’ll talk about how Instructional Design and Screenshots can leverage and scale your process with efficiency.
Why is instructional design important when documenting SOPs and what businesses gain with it?
Choosing to apply Instructional Design techniques and tools to your SOPs is a conscious decision. After all, delivering information without any means of making it more digestible might end up being just a message in a bottle in the hope of anyone ever reading it.
Your SOPs are supposed to bring you a competitive edge. So, instructional design accompanied with screenshots make it for the perfect tool to make sure your organization benefits from your process documentation.
Other major benefits of SOPs when delivered with engaging instructional design tools are:
- Faster time to value | With better designed materials, new hires can go up to the speed you expect 3x faster.
- Improved cost x benefit of hiring and training | The use of Instructional Design also improves the cost-effectiveness of training. This is because it makes actions more effective in terms of time and the way in which content is presented to employees, vendors and partners.
- Measurable results of delegated tasks | It is also with the help of Instructional Design that each task can be delegated with specific goals and focused on the business objective. It ensures that each action is effective, productive and will result in the expected impact.
But what is instructional design?
Instructional Design emerged as an urgent demand during World War II in the United States. With no time to train more than 16 million people who were going to war – many of whom were having their first experience with the army – it was necessary to look for more agile ways to train those guys fast.
Therefore, the psychologists recruited to develop the trainings defined some bases for the creation of the content. It defined the methodology we know today as Instructional Design.
Later, the method also began to be applied in other fields, such as industry, business and even academia. Thus, it is common for teaching materials to undergo a pedagogical “treatment”, which ends up differentiating them from the “raw” material found in basic textbooks, for example.
How instructional design works better with screenshots?
Some companies believe that merely delivering information is enough for their SOPS to be well communicated. What they might be ignoring is that the way they hand over that information to their teams is as important as the information itself. In order to achieve educational goals, Instructional Design needs to have redundancies. That’s where screenshots come in.
Once you’re delivering your SOP in a way that includes text+images, that step-by-step guide will not only be explaining but also show how that task should be accomplished.
Research shows that information can be absorbed by our brain up to 60,000 times faster when accompanied by imagery.
Do your SOPs take instructional design into account?
Whether online or in person, every training and development activity can benefit from the application of Instructional Design and Screenshots. That's why we at Waybook partnered with Tango.us to come up with a seamless integration that can 10x the effectiveness of your SOPs.
We understand the importance of focused and optimized materials for learning. So, with Waybook, you’ll be able to centralize all your training, onboarding, documentation and best practices in a single source of truth for your team. Plus, with our new Tango integration, you can import your processes from there directly to your Waybook.
You can see the step-by-step on how to do it in the Import to Waybook from Tango article of our Help Center.
So, now that you know the importance of ID for your content, how about letting us help you on your corporate education journey? Click here to start with Waybook for free.
Happy SOPing!
Want to get more insights on the future of Training & Management? Check out our related resources:
- Employee Training and Development Methods with Examples
- How To Train Employees on New Software
- Employee Cross Training Plan Template
