Breaking down learning barriers by integrating B12 into Microsoft Teams

B12 is a learning application that uses cognitive science and artificial intelligence to increase the effectiveness of your training courses. It's a tool for reinforcing new knowledge and accelerating its use in the workplace.

Skills development is a necessity that is becoming a key competitive asset in a labor shortage context. It's one of the most important means of keeping employees happy and performing well.

According to a Glint report, skills development has become the most important lever for an excellent organizational culture.

Yet many barriers to learning remain, such as lack of time, accessibility issues, complexity of solutions, lack of meaningful data and the absence of solutions that encourage the development of new habits. To break down these barriers and accentuate the learning culture in organizations, we are proud to announce our newest integration with Microsoft Teams. During the pandemic, Teams became the collaboration tool of choice, with over 250 million monthly active users. All B12 functionalities are now integrated into the application. This allows us to :

• Optimize learning in the workflow
• Maximize the use of Teams to enhance the learning experience
• Support supervisors and managers with data
• Easily track daily habits

Optimizing learning in the workflow

Despite the importance of skills development, there always seems to be something more urgent to do, and training is often pushed to the bottom of our priority pile. Yet, it's crucial for organizations to prioritize learning and to demonstrate it to employees. In 2018, renowned analyst Josh Bersin explained that an employee has just 24 minutes a week for formal learning, and this has decreased dramatically in the last 4 years between now and 2018. One of the solutions to this barrier is to integrate the learning process into the workflow.

This is why B12's conversational agent (bot) in Teams sends a notification (nudge) to the learner to inform him or her that a microlearning activity is ready. By chatting with the agent, the learner can launch the session directly in Teams, or reschedule it for a better moment.

B12's conversational agent offers short activities to keep learners active at all times. It is also possible to synchronize the various courses in one's Outlook calendar to highlight learning activities.

Maximizing Teams to enhance the learner experience

Teams users are constantly using the application for meetings, looking for files or creating documents. For the sake of simplicity and efficiency, they prefer to use the same application for all their tasks. It's therefore a huge advantage to be able to train or reinforce knowledge from within the same application.

The integration of B12 into Team improves accessibility and enables training to be carried out without having to switch from one application to another. What's even greater, is the mobile interface, which enables employees to access their training paths whenever and wherever they need to, to strengthen their individual performance as well as company performance.

Supporting supervisors and managers with data

Employees see supervisors and managers as their primary resource for improving performance and developing their skills.

According to a study by Degreed and Havard Business Publishing, employees consult their supervisors for learning recommendations 22% more often than they consult existing tools (intranet, LMS etc.), and 73% more often than consulting their company's training team.

However, supervisors are often overwhelmed, and it's difficult to have ongoing conversations about development opportunities. Supervisors are asked to coach their employees, but coach them about what?

To solve this problem, B12 sends a report directly to supervisors through Teams. This report details the results of each learner or group according to strategic performance indicators. It's ideal for identifying gaps, taking stock, and then clarifying expectations to improve the identified elements.

Easy to follow daily habits

We often neglect to consider that the skills we develop imply a change in our daily habits. Whether it's soft skills or technical skills, we sometimes view learning in relation to the content we need to communicate, whereas many of our objectives can be achieved by working on simple, concrete behaviors. Research and evidence suggests that behavior change is greatly facilitated by the introduction of an action plan, including triggers that enable us to put these behaviors into practice. Teams allows us to regularly monitor this action plan, measure the acquisition of habits, and continuously update the action plan according to achievements, all without having to leave our work environment.

We're excited to join the ranks of Microsoft AppSource and the Teams Store as a Teams-integrated software. This integration of B12 into Teams removes some of the barriers for learning and gives companies, managers and their employees a modern application that is fully integrated into the workflow. B12 meets a real need: to maximize the impact of training courses.