Feed Your Elephant are experts at creating intelligent apps that help businesses take control of their teams’ learning and in 2020 the team partnered with Haines Watts to help our people live and breathe our values every day. Feed Your Elephant was founded by Jim Gant in 2018, based on an idea that had stayed with Jim after failing a French test in secondary school. After being pulled in front of the class for a low score and told to retake the test, teenage Jim developed a computer programme to help him learn the vocabulary for the test, came back a few days later, took the test and aced it. Now, decades on, those same techniques are being used to help people retain knowledge of everything from wine to wealth management.
We sat down for a virtual lunch with Keith Grafham, Managing Director at Feed Your Elephant and Emma Storer, Head of People at Haines Watts, to find out what the future of learning looks like for businesses and how adopting a new way of learning has helped the Haines Watts team discover what our values really mean.
Over two years ago we asked everyone across Haines Watts the same question; “What are the factors that lead to success at Haines Watts?” We spotted right away that there were common themes that came out of the answers, especially around the importance of shared values; our DNA. To us these values are not just words on a page, they help us build and maintain brilliant teams, and strengthen our relationships with clients – but we need to live and breathe them every day. With this knowledge we partnered with Feed Your Elephant to build the Values Knowledge Platform, an interactive app that allows the team to train their brain and reflect on what our values mean in the real world.
We know that people are happiest and at their best when they are part of a culture that they can relate to and feel proud of. That’s why we invested in our Values Knowledge Platform, to help us to embed our values in a simple, innovative and powerful way. The platform is a mobile application that uses AI to give people at every level the chance to immerse themselves in our values and behaviours.
Learning values and behaviours are very different to learning information, like for your driving theory test for example, where you only need to be able to retain and regurgitate what you have learnt. With values and soft skills, you have to have the knowledge initially, but you also have to have the means to apply it in the real world.
Emma and the Haines Watts team worked closely with us to create a mechanism to help people meaningfully apply what they have learnt – one of these things was embedding videos into the platform showing some of the Haines Watts team talking about their experiences of the values and showing what good looks like. This helps people see what living and breathing the values really means.
We have done a lot of research into what makes learning effective, and what doesn’t, and while we would love to say that we have reinvented the wheel – we haven’t really! Simply, the real core of the technology is effective and efficient learning methods that are well-established but not very well used, particularly spaced repetition. Spaced is the principle of testing oneself on information that you are likely to be close to forgetting, so the retrieval of the information can take effort, which helps strengthen particular neurological pathways in the brain, encoding information into our long-term memory.
If you think about when someone tells you their name or a fact about themselves, then an hour later that information is there but a little fuzzy, that is the best time to have the information reiterated before it is lost and you have to start the process again, it is called desirable difficulty. What’s clever about our technology is that not only does it space out the learning based on a user’s response, it does this based on the individual user – that means if you and I both used it, we would see different outcomes based on our individual knowledge and learning journey. Effectively the more you use the app the more it learns from you and the more unique it becomes to you.
There is some fascinating science around when you do any training or learning, if you do a test at the end of it you are much more likely to remember what you have been told. Our app has built-in multiple-choice testing which is timed so you can track your learning and progress for each segment. Seeing tangible progress allows you to feel confident in this learning method.
The Values Knowledge Platform is an important part of our values programme which will help us all know our DNA but it is one part of a much wider strategy that will continue over the years as we evolve as a business. After we developed the values and really understood the business drivers behind them, for us the next key purpose of this project was to develop the knowledge consistently within the organisation – and that’s when we started conversations with Feed Your Elephant as their technology seemed like the perfect fit. It really encourages conversation and interaction between teams which is incredibly important when we have people located all across the UK. We spent a lot of time during the build to make sure that the platform draws out good behaviour and gives people the tools to put that into practice in a Haines Watts environment with a colleague or a client. It was a real challenge to take people from simply understanding the information to thinking, ‘Aha! This is how I put it together and this is how it works’. That’s why we wanted to leverage this technology to give people a better understanding and really take ownership of their part of the journey. Over 50 percent of the Haines Watts team have engaged with the app already and the feedback that we have been getting is overwhelmingly positive.
The platform really helped embed our values and we could see the numbers of colleagues who engaged with it overall; as a core project team we were able to monitor this easily to see how people were developing and we could also keep the content refreshed adding in new videos to keep the experience as relevant as possible. The ability to report on how many people changed or enhanced their behaviours after engaging with the platform was critical and we can learn from it to take forward to the other parts of our values project. The app has since been made available to new starters as part of our on-boarding process.
Turn over the page to see Emma explaining how Feed Your Elephant implemented their technology into the Haines Watts values app…
Emma: Kings Cross is such an easy place for us to meet so we would be settling down in Grainger and Co. I love their crab linguine with a traditional mojito, perfect for a sunny day like today. Keith: I’ll second that! I would be ordering the parmesan crumbed chicken schnitzel, creamed corn and shredded fennel – I’m getting hungry just thinking about it! Hopefully our next meeting will be in person!
To chat to Feed Your Elephant about how a micro learning platform could benefit your business contact the team via info@feedyourelephant.com.
