GainKnowHow

GainKnowHow VS. Notion

2022-03-24T00:00:00-06:00

GainKnowHow VS. Notion

Notion is the Swiss Army Knife of software. You can do everything from track projects to store an employee directory. If you are a small company starting off, storing your internal documentation in Notion can be effective. However, as you grow, you will find shortcomings in storing your documents and onboarding employees in Notion, which GainKnowHow can help solve.

Eddie Anderson

Published on 24 Mar 2022

We actually use Notion internally at GainKnowHow because of its incredible flexibility. It's great for project management. You can easily get project management up and running in minutes. If you have a custom workflow, you can probably implement it in Notion.

However, it's not the best platform for internal documentation and onboarding. Just like GainKnowHow is not the best platform to manage your projects, Notion is not the best platform at storing your internal documents and onboarding employees. Notion is lacking key features GainKnowHow has to keep your team on the same page.

"Just like GainKnowHow is not the best platform to manage your projects, Notion is not the best platform at storing your internal documents and onboarding employees."

GainKnowHow Overview

GainKnowHow is a knowledge propagation platform. GainKnowHow's goal is to spread knowledge throughout an organization, keeping everyone on the same page. It stores your organization's internal skills but most importantly keeps track of changes to users' skills over time, intelligently notifying them of these changes. GainKnowHow also ensures users have the context to learn advanced skills by presenting skills to them in the correct order.

Notion Overview

Notion is an open-ended tool that can be used in a variety of ways. It's a lightweight CRM, a database, and a document store. With all of its features, Notion could be summed up as a workflow automation platform. It's great when building a custom workflow for a specific process in your organization.

GainKnowHow Advantages

GainKnowHow takes a different approach in organizing documents/skills than Notion. GainKnowHow stores documents in a Knowledge Web that reflects how documents are related which allows for many useful features.

Skill Learning Paths:

Teach skills to your employees in the correct order and with all the needed prerequisites, ensuring comprehension.
Change Management:

Users get notified of the exact changes to a skill when it gets edited or when a new skill is added to their learning path.
Admin Skill Tracking:

Admins can see how each user is progressing in the learning paths, making sure employees are learning at the right speed.
Quizzes and Approvals:

Optionally assign a quiz or get another user's approval to ensure an employee truly understand the skill they are learning.

These features end up creating a platform that ensures employees are on the same page on your organization's documentation.

Notion Advantages

Notion's biggest advantage is its flexibility. If you want to automate a custom process in your company, Notion can probably be used to make a tailor-made workflow. Notion has databases and wikis that can be molded to your exact use case.

Employee onboarding use case comparison

Let's compare how each platform would approach onboarding a new employee. In this scenario we need to teach a new customer support employee the skills they need to do their job quickly and effectively.

GainKnowHow's approach

The first day the new customer support employee is assigned the advanced skills they need to correctly resolve customer support tickets. The new employee learns the basic skills first around the expected language that management wants to use when talking to customers, which is required to eventually handle support tickets.

For each skill the new employee takes there are quiz questions to confirm they truly understand the skill and are not just skimming over the material.

For some more interact customer support skills the employee is asked to roll-play a customer support scenario with a manager, which the manager signs off on, allowing the employee to continue learning customer support skills.

Finally, the new employee has successfully completed all the skills needed to do the assigned customer support tickets and their manager is notified.

In the future, when the manager wants to change the specific language they want to use when talking to customers they edit the specific skills in GainKnowHow. Every customer support employee who has taken the skills around customer support language are notified of the exact changes to the language management wants to use.

Notion's approach

The first day the new customer support employee is given an account it Notion with documents describing how to resolve customer support tickets. The new employee starts reading these documents and reports back to their manager that they have read all the documents in the "customer support" folder in Notion.

The new customer support employee is given their first customer support ticket in ZenDesk. The employee vaguely remembers how the page in Notion told them how to use ZenDesk because they just skimmed over it and were not quizzed on their knowledge. Eventually, the employee gets an idea how ZenDesk works and starts answering customer's tickets, but not in the exact manner that was described in the Notion page.

A few weeks go by and the manager realizes the new employee has been filling out fields in Zendesk wrong. The tickets were not closed correctly and the customers were never notified of the resolution from the new employee, delaying customer support time.

Eventually, the manager wants to make a change on how customers support employees talk to customers. He schedules an hour long department wide meeting to discuss the simple changes, taking the support staff away from closing tickets. The manager forgets to update the Notion page on customer communication with the changes. Future new employees have to learn this change from chatting with coworkers.

Which document store is right for you?

Notion is the Swiss Army Knife of software. It makes sense to initially store your documents in Notion because of its flexibility. However, you wouldn't build a house with just a Swiss Army Knife. As you grow you'll need specialized tools to grow your organization. A Swiss Army Knife does't have a nail gun. GainKnowHow is the nail gun of onboarding. Building a house is much more efficient with a nail gun, but there is a still a need for the Swiss Army Knife. So keep Notion around to do your project management workflows, but when you're ready for a specialized tool for onboarding and documentation, GainKnowHow is the more effective tool.

GainKnowHow VS. Confluence

2022-03-03T00:00:00-07:00

GainKnowHow VS. Confluence

Confluence is primarily a document store. It's great to share documents, but does not structure them in a way that easily spreads knowledge throughout your organization.

Eddie Anderson

Published on 03 Mar 2022

Confluence has been around since 2004 and has been the go-to document store for many organizations. If your organization's documentation strategy is to just make a document and hope other team members find it, Confluence is right for you. GainKnowHow's goal is to spread knowledge throughout an organization, not just store it in a shared location.

"GainKnowHow's goal is to spread knowledge throughout an organization, not just store it in a shared location. "

GainKnowHow Overview

Confluence Overview

Confluence's goal is to store documents in a shared location. Confluence's documents are visually appealing and have many different document types and ways to collaborate on them. It integrates well into the Atlassian ecosystem such as project management with Jira.

GainKnowHow Advantages

GainKnowHow takes a different approach in organizing documents/skills than Confluence. GainKnowHow stores documents in a Knowledge Web that reflects how documents are related which allows for many useful features.

Skill Learning Paths:

Teach skills to your employees in the correct order and with all the needed prerequisites, ensuring comprehension.
Change Management:

Users get notified of the exact changes to a skill when it gets edited or when a new skill is added to their learning path.
Admin Skill Tracking:

Admins can see how each user is progressing in the learning paths, making sure employees are learning at the right speed.
Quizzes and Approvals:

Optionally assign a quiz or get another user's approval to ensure an employee truly understand the skill they are learning.

These features end up creating a platform that ensures employees are on the same page on your organization's documentation.

Confluence Advantages

Confluence is an industry-standard solution for document storing a collaboration. It has a great track record of success in storing documents. It has many integrations into Atlassian's ecosystem which makes some project management processes very easy. Confluence's documents have more visually editing flexibility.

Which document store is right for your organization?

GainKnowHow was created out of the problems that come out of an unstructured document store. Confluence is great at storing and sharing documents, but lacks context to other documents in your organization. You cannot give an advanced company-specific document to a new hire and expect them to really understand the concept because they lack the context with other documents. GainKnowHow provides documents in the correct order to allow new hires to quickly understand complex topics with full context. GainKnowHow also handles document changes better by notifying users to the exact changes to their previously learned documents.

GainKnowHow VS. Trainual

2022-03-02T00:00:00-07:00

GainKnowHow VS. Trainual

The key difference between Trainual and GainKnowHow is that Trainual specializes in creating online courses. GainKnowHow also creates online courses, but structures your courses in a Knowledge Web that represents how your organization runs.

Eddie Anderson

Published on 02 Mar 2022

Picking the right learning platform for your organization is key to avoiding headaches down the road. Trainual is an e-learning alternative to GainKnowHow. The two overlap in many areas, but GainKnowHow is fundamentally different in how skills are organized, which enables many features that Trainual lacks.

“Trainual is a good online course editor, but does not organize your skills to represent how your organization runs, when compared to GainKnowHow ”

GainKnowHow Overview

At the core of GainKnowHow is ordered learning. New employees need to understand the basics before learning advanced organization-specific skills. In GainKnowHow you organize skills by prerequisite in a Knowledge Web. Once your skills are in the Knowledge Web you get skill progression and change management features.

Trainual Overview

Trainual is an e-learning platform that specializes in online lessons. There are many ways to take a lesson in Trainual from live lessons to online lessons.

GainKnowHow Advantages

GainKnowHow is a reflection of how your organization runs. Learning material and internal documentation are one in the same. Changing a process at your organization is as simple as updating the skill in GainKnowHow that reflects the process. GainKnowHow knows what employees the change is relevant to and notifies them of the exact process changes.

New employees learn skills in the correct order to ensure they have full understanding of complex concepts at your organization.

Trainual Advantages

Trainual has more flexibility on how lessons are organized. There are more options to configure how you want your lesson to look. There are more questions that the learner can take to ensure they understand the lesson.

Trainual has live online courses. There are also options for blended learning courses for more learning flexibility.

Software Capabilities

Your e-learning platform is at the core at organizational cohesion. Make sure your e-learning platform has the right tools for its job.

Online Lessons

Online lessons are at the core of any learning system. In order to be successful, the platform must teach employees the topics.

GainKnowHow

Rich lesson editor
Emendable video and images

Trainual

Live online lessons
Multiple lesson formats
Many question formats

Learning Progressions

Learning Progressions make sure each employee takes lessons in the correct order.

GainKnowHow

One knowledge web that contains information on skill prerequisites
Adding a new skill in the knowledge web ensures employees relevant to the new skill take it

Trainual

Each lesson can be part of a path
No notification of lesson path changes

Learning Analytics

Having insights into how employees are progressing in the skills you assign them is critical to them becoming a successful employee.

GainKnowHow

Visually see employees progression in the Knowledge Web
Assign skills with deadlines for employees to complete

Trainual

See what lessons each employee has completed

Change Management

Change Management is the ability to change a skill/lesson and have its changes spread to the relevant employees.

GainKnowHow

Visually see what has changed in skills across different versions
Get notified on new skill requirements from edits to the Knowledge Web

Trainual

None

Which e-learning platform is right for your organization?

If you are only looking to create lessons and have your employees take the lessons, Trainual might meet your needs. However, if you are looking for a platform to run your organization's processes and keep every member on the same page, GainKnowHow is the platform for you. GainKnowHow is a living document that describes how you want your organization run. It is more than an e-learning platform, it takes e-learning to the next level and lets you program your organization through skills.

GainKnowHow VS. 360Learning

2022-02-16T00:00:00-07:00

GainKnowHow VS. 360Learning

The key difference between 360Learning and GainKnowHow is that 360Learning specializes in creating online courses. GainKnowHow also creates online courses, but structures your courses in a Knowledge Web that represents how your organization runs.

Eddie Anderson

Published on 16 Feb 2022

Picking the right learning platform for your organization is key to avoiding headaches down the road. 360Learning is an e-learning alternative to GainKnowHow. The two overlap in many areas, but GainKnowHow is fundamentally different in how skills are organized, which enables many features that 360Learning lacks.

“360Learning is a good online course editor, but does not organize your skills to represent how your organization runs, when compared to GainKnowHow ”

GainKnowHow Overview

360Learning Overview

360Learning is an e-learning platform that specializes in online lessons. There are many ways to take a lesson in 360Learning from live lessons to online lessons.

GainKnowHow Advantages

New employees learn skills in the correct order to ensure they have full understanding of complex concepts at your organization.

360Learning Advantages

360Learning has more flexibility on how lessons are organized. There are more options to configure how you want your lesson to look. There are more questions that the learner can take to ensure they understand the lesson.

360Learning has live online courses. There are also options for blended learning courses for more learning flexibility.

Software Capabilities

Your e-learning platform is at the core at organizational cohesion. Make sure your e-learning platform has the right tools for its job.

Online Lessons

Online lessons are at the core of any learning system. In order to be successful, the platform must teach employees the topics.

GainKnowHow

Rich lesson editor
Emendable video and images

360Learning

Live online lessons
Multiple lesson formats
Many question formats

Learning Progressions

Learning Progressions make sure each employee takes lessons in the correct order.

GainKnowHow

One knowledge web that contains information on skill prerequisites
Adding a new skill in the knowledge web ensures employees relevant to the new skill take it

360Learning

Each lesson can be part of a path
No notification of lesson path changes

Learning Analytics

Having insights into how employees are progressing in the skills you assign them is critical to them becoming a successful employee.

GainKnowHow

Visually see employees progression in the Knowledge Web
Assign skills with deadlines for employees to complete

360Learning

See what lessons each employee has completed

Change Management

Change Management is the ability to change a skill/lesson and have its changes spread to the relevant employees.

GainKnowHow

Visually see what has changed in skills across different versions
Get notified on new skill requirements from edits to the Knowledge Web

360Learning

None

Which e-learning platform is right for your organization?

If you are only looking to create lessons and have your employees take the lessons, 360Learning might meet your needs. However, if you are looking for a platform to run your organization's processes and keep every member on the same page, GainKnowHow is the platform for you. GainKnowHow is a living document that describes how you want your organization run. It is more than an e-learning platform, it takes e-learning to the next level and lets you program your organization through skills.

10 Steps for a Successful Employee Onboarding

2022-02-13T00:00:00-07:00

10 Steps for a Successful Employee Onboarding

Once you’ve hired a new employee for your organization, it’s up to your HR team and management to ensure you have a successful employee onboarding program in place.

Eddie Anderson

Published on 13 Feb 2022

Onboarding is one of the most overlooked processes that builds a strong organization.

A good onboarding process will lead to company cohesion, strong employee relationships, and overall a smooth-running organization.

A bad onboarding process will produce confusion, zombie employees, and misguided efforts.

GainKnowHow makes a couple of steps easier in onboarding employees, but by no means is a cure-all to automate your whole onboarding process.

“Onboarding is an ongoing, constantly evolving processes that emerges out of the company's culture, no one piece of software can replace all of that.”

1. Get Everyone to Agree on an Onboarding Plan

Before even starting to plan your onboarding program, make sure your HR team and senior management discuss how this program will look. Take time to figure out when onboarding starts and what tools should be involved. Also, consider how long it should last and what you are looking to achieve from the onboarding experience.

2. Create Goals for the Employee Experience

In order to create successful employee onboarding experiences, you need to set goals for the sessions. Make sure you have a clear aim in mind for new employees to help you all understand what they should learn by the end of the onboarding program. Find ways to gather feedback from new employees. This will help you measure the success of your hiring onboarding once it’s in place.

GainKnowHow Can Help

GainKnowHow is the perfect platform to organize your skills in a progression towards a skill as a goal.

Assign a new employee and skill deep in your Knowledge Web as a goal to achieve in a expected time-frame.

3. Start With the Hiring Process

While you might think that onboarding only focuses on successful candidates, in fact, it starts with the hiring process. Hiring managers need to ensure they are making a good first impression with candidates, which can help to set you apart from other companies. Your human resources team should be available at all times to candidates, especially once they receive their offer letter. The more support you can offer them, the more likely they’ll choose your workplace for their next job role.

GainKnowHow Can Help

GainKnowHow can be used to train you HR staff on exactly how you want to communicate with potential hires.

Create a skill your organization's Knowledge Web that describes acceptable communication styles for potential hires.

4. The First Office Visit

The first office visit is an important stage of the onboarding process. This should aim to show new employees where they will be working and meet some of their colleagues. Take your time touring your facilities. Ensure you show new hires communal areas such as the kitchen and canteen. The more they can learn about what working at your office will be like, the more excited they’ll be to receive their start date.

5. Write a Welcoming Offer Letter

While you may think that every candidate would be thrilled to receive an offer letter, remember, you might not be the only company sending one their way. The offer letter should clearly state their start date and roles and responsibilities so that they are fully aware of what’s expected from them. This is another chance to welcome any follow-up questions, which can help to avoid issues further down the line.

6. Set Expectations From Day One

The first day on a new job should set very clear expectations for new team members. You should introduce the objectives of their role so they know exactly what’s expected from them on day one in your work environment. It’s important for you to introduce them to their co-workers as soon as possible, which can be more of a challenge during the current pandemic. Find ways to overcome this issue if you are working remotely, such as having a Zoom happy hour or using employee onboarding software with new team members.

GainKnowHow Can Help

GainKnowHow is perfect for setting your new hire's onboarding expectations. On their first day assign them a complex skill deep in your Knowledge Web for them to learn.

You can track the new hire's progress in achieving the goals you've assigned them in GainKnowHow.

7. Focus on Social Interaction

Feeling like you are part of a community is essential when starting a new job. Some companies will organize a lunch or gathering on day one, which helps to create a welcoming atmosphere within the business. You’ll show your new team members that there’s always support around for them, which can make a huge difference to how well they settle in at your company.

8. Meet and Greets During the First Few Weeks

Starting at a new organization is a chance for employees to network and broaden their horizons within any industry. HR professionals in your workplace should organize meet and greets for the first few weeks of someone’s time at your company. This gives them a chance to familiarize themselves with key figures in the organization and increases employee engagement. It’s a good chance to showcase your company culture and encourage employees to mix between departments.

9. Ongoing Team Building

When looking through your onboarding checklist, this isn’t something that should end within a few weeks of someone joining your company. Instead, you need to schedule regular checks with your employees to keep making them feel like they are part of your organization. Ingrain team building into the culture of your company so that team members are able to continue forming new connections.

10. Schedule Regular Check-Ins With New Employees

Within the first 90 days, you want to check in with new employees every couple of weeks. This gives you a chance to check how they are doing. If you find someone is struggling, you can take the time to help them out and answer any questions they have. Sometimes all it takes is a leader checking in from time to time to make a huge difference to how valued someone feels within their workplace. In large organizations, it’s so easy for new employees to get lost in the everyday hustle and bustle. Take time out to make sure they are settling in okay and enjoying being part of your workplace.

“So many teams struggle to make their onboarding experience anywhere near as good as their core product, so the results of this is poor retention”

Onboarding at your Organization Evolves Over Time

As you can see, there’s a lot to consider when creating a successful employee onboarding program at your workplace. By following these ten steps we’ve shared above, you’ll make everyone in your organization feel welcomed from the application process through to their first few months working for your company. In time, you’ll find that you have this process down to a fine art, and you won’t have to work so hard to welcome new employees. Strive to make employee boarding something that comes naturally to the leaders within your organization. Your organization will soon become a much more welcoming and enjoyable place to work, helping you to retain top talent for many years to come.

Learn More About Employee Onboarding With GainKnowHow