Background

As a company with 2500 employees and offices in 20 locations, it is necessary to ensure that corporate documents contain consistent formatting. Employees often collaborate on documentation, which requires document creators and editors to adhere to the same set of standards. When the same standards are not used, much time is wasted on reformatting documents that are no longer consistent. Documents often become corrupt through extraneous formatting that has been applied and work product is being lost in the process.

Objectives

All editors of company documents must learn and adhere to company-established guidelines and standards. To achieve this, a training program should be developed and delivered across all document editors across all offices. Additionally, the Documentation department employees will be responsible for making certain that all users in their respective offices follow these guidelines and assist users as they attempt utilize what they’ve learned through the training.

Plan

Through previous studies conducted at the company using Richard M. Felder’s Learning Styles and Strategies evaluation, we have concluded that a majority (87%) of employees are learners who exhibit strong tendencies toward the following learning styles:

§ Reflective

§ Sensing

§ Visual

§ Global

In addition to the training, a new item will be added to annual employee performance appraisals in which they will be evaluated on their level of adherence to document standards.

To achieve the objective of better document formatting practices through adherence to company guidelines, we are proposing that learning is developed in the following three ways:

§ Written manual

§ Web site

§ Multimedia DVD

The following proposes how to address the above listed learning styles through the following learning formats.

Manual

Because we are teaching global learners, we will begin all materials with an introduction of the importance of guidelines and standards and how they affect all employees and clients who receive our work product. It will be important for our learners to understand how this learning fits into the big picture.

The written materials will contain real-life examples and scenarios that enable readers to understand how the subject relates to their own work. Because they are visual learners, it will be graphical in nature, with screen shots with callouts utilized as much as possible. The objective of the manual is to provide reference materials for the learners that will accompany the website and multimedia learning. The manual will contain chapters on each subject, for example, Styles & Direct Formatting, Document Storage Location, Automatic Numbering, and Paragraph Formatting. Each chapter will define what the subject is, what will be covered in the chapter, and what they should be able to do after completing the chapter. This will allow the reflective learner to understand what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how this new knowledge will affect their real work.

Web site

The Web site will also begin with a section on the home page about the importance of the document guidelines in the firm. The heading for this section will be placed directly beneath the main picture on the page to draw the user’s attention there first. This will help the visual, sensory, reflective and global learning characteristics to achieve some level of satisfaction right from the beginning.

A section that is organized by different clickable scenarios will be visible on the site. The learner can select the scenario that most closely describes his/her work situation and takes into consideration his/her role in the company, e.g., a secretary, documentation department staff, executive, etc. The learner will be able to use real company documents in exercises so that they will have more meaning to their real work.

Multimedia DVD

Since we are dealing with visual learners, we will include a DVD that will contain an on-screen simulation of document formatting procedures that the learner can watch. Audio will accompany the instruction, but the learner can opt to turn it off or on as they prefer. After watching the on-screen simulation, the learner will conduct several exercises by formatting documents as well as having to “clean up” poorly formatted documents. This will help enforce how important it is for others they collaborate with that the documents they share have consistent formatting, and will help satisfy the need for “big picture” understanding.

Conclusion

To achieve the company objective of adhering to standard document guidelines, and satisfy a majority of the learning styles that exist in our company, we should employ a combination of these learning formats (Manual, Web site, Multimedia DVD). Providing big picture concepts and meaningful examples with a connection to the real work environment in a visually appealing way will fulfill the needs of our employees who exhibit a combination of reflective, sensory, visual and global learning styles. Appealing to these styles will encourage use and success of the training to meet the company objectives.