Performance Support
Performance Support
What is performance support?
- Information delivered at the moment of work
- Don’t make people memorize everything; let them 'pull it up when needed'
- Checklists, manuals, chatbots, and more
Once performance support becomes a formal practice, the first question you ask when a training request comes in changes. Instead of 'how many hours should this course be?', you first ask 'is this something to memorize, or something to look up when needed?' Procedures, standards, and figures that can simply be referenced move to work screens and field tools, while training concentrates on areas that reference material can never replace, such as conversations that call for judgment and handling exceptions. With the same budget, you run fewer courses, but each is denser.
Four questions tell you whether a task suits performance support: Is it rarely performed (once or twice a quarter)? Does it have many steps? Does it change often? Is a mistake costly? By contrast, work with no time to look things up, such as customer conversations that need an answer within 3 seconds or negotiation, still belongs to training and coaching. Of the 'five moments of need' for learning outlined by Gottfredson and Mosher, applying, when things change, and when something goes wrong fall within performance support, while learning for the first time and learning in depth belong to training.
It is easily confused with knowledge management (KM), and the boundary is 'where it lives.' KM builds a well-organized repository and expects people to come find things, but performance support only works if it sits inside the screen where people work. The rule of thumb is simple: if it doesn’t show up within three clicks and 30 seconds, employees just ask the senior colleague next to them. At that moment, even the best-made material might as well not exist.
The most common failure is uploading an existing manual PDF to a bulletin board and calling it performance support. A 200-page document can’t be searched, and what can’t be searched won’t be used. Even riskier is an ownerless job aid. If a rule changes but the checklist doesn’t, employees confidently follow the wrong procedure. That is worse than having nothing. So naming a revision owner and fixing an update cycle comes before rollout, and without it, that material becomes a wrong-answer generator within six months.
Anna ChoExpert in organizational culture, coaching, emotion management, and CS consulting
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of B2B Marketing DesignThe concept was developed by instructional technologists such as Gloria Gery and Allison Rossett, who distinguished 'performance support' from 'learning.' It has recently evolved into EPSS and AI copilots.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A imports and distributes medical devices. It has 320 employees, 85 of them field service engineers who visit hospitals nationwide. With more than 40 types of equipment and firmware revised 4 times a year, the revisit rate caused by inspection report errors had climbed to 18%. The training team ran a 2-day classroom course every year, but three months after each session, field inquiries rose right back to their old level.
- The head of training pulled six months of help desk tickets, 1,840 in all, and sorted them. 62% clustered around just 12 procedures. The conclusion of that meeting: "These aren't questions from people who never learned it. They're questions from people who couldn't find it when they needed it."
- Those 12 procedures were built into the tablet inspection app engineers use, as step-by-step checklists. Following a 10-year engineer’s request—"make everything reachable within three taps, even with gloves on"—every item was placed within 3 taps.
- In a 4-week pilot with 12 engineers, items with side-by-side photos were used 3 times as often as text-only items. After that, the 8 procedures with frequent errors were given both normal and abnormal photos.
- The quality team’s Mr. Kim was named revision owner, and the rule was set: update the checklist within 48 hours of a firmware revision notice and show the version date at the top of the screen. If an update runs late, the item is automatically grayed out so no one can use it.
- Six months later, the revisit rate fell from 18% to 5.4%, and help desk inquiries dropped from 340 to 118 a month. The time before a new engineer could take solo visits also shortened from 12 weeks to 7, so classroom training was cut from 2 days to 1 and the remaining day went to customer-handling practice.