What are the hateful 8? The top 8 questions your managers and senior team members have answered hundreds of times for their new hires, colleagues and subordinates that they would love to never have to answer again! In previous posts we’ve talked about how deploying any learning without real buy-in from your team will be unsuccessful. Here is an exercise to get your group excited about utilizing micro learning by addressing those top most hated questions.

1) Ask your group of managers & senior team members to share the “hateful 8”: The top 8 questions that they’re tired of answering themselves. 

– Characterize it as: “What are the top 8 questions you have answered 100X and you really wish you didn’t need to again!”

– Have them write down the top 8 questions they constantly answer.

– Have them each add their entries and number them from 1-8 based on “1” being the biggest pain to constantly answer and “8” being the least. This can be done via a web conference, in a live meeting or off-line by sharing a google sheet.

– Take time to organize the questions which will probably be a lot more than 8, post them and have everyone vote and pick the top 8 winners in order.

2) How long does each question take to answer?

Beside each candidate question, whoever adds a question have them indicate how long it now takes to answer. Ask them to indicate what process they currently do to answer it. Would it require a demonstration of equipment, dealing with customers, steps on a computer or could it be done verbally? Combined with the above votes tabulate the results into a spreadsheet and send to everyone.

3) Create two micro learning courses for the top two questions of the hateful 8.

Contact one or two of the managers or team members you know who authored the top two hateful 8 questions and work with them to create a micro learning course they would be proud to share to their team.

4) Present the two courses to everyone. 

Either in person, through a web conference or from a recorded video, present the courses you created to the entire group. Talk about why you chose to make the course as you did. Show how if it’s a more involved question and answer they may need to record a video of the process with text and images and if a shorter answer, the course could be one page as a simple job aid.

5) Get more volunteers! 

Then take volunteers who felt strongly about the other six remaining hated questions. Help them build an appropriate length micro learning course to answer their questions. Show them the ropes to both building micro learning and some best practices to motivate them to continue and to be proud of their results. Then share those questions with everyone.

6) Over the following weeks and months, continue to follow-up with the team members you’ve assisted in creating courses for. Continue to solicit and assist more volunteers who have their own “hateful 8” and the many other questions their tired of answering. 

Micro learning engagement can now grow.

See our AI and the Augmented Workforce primer on how a workforce and technology can effectively work on tasks together. 

A big driver for us at Feathercap is our search and workplace learning content curation solutions. Feel free to contact us for more.