“I enjoy winning my badges day after day. What a great tool to perfect my knowledge and to make me realize that I have room for improvement… and it becomes addictive and fun.”
– Axonify user
How Axonify works
Workforce training is a constant problem. Employees don’t have time to log in. Content is forgotten, performance doesn’t improve and results take a dive. Axonify is built to address these issues—and get results. Here’s how we do it.
Built for how people learn
We say we’re fueled by “brain science,” but what does that actually mean?
Humans are built to consume and retain information in small bites over time. The best way to lock this info into our memory is to use it as soon as we can after we learn it. You know what they say…use it or lose it. Unfortunately, we’re built to forget. It’s a feature, not a bug. Traditional corporate training fights against this human nature, focusing on long training sessions and dense materials that employees will forget within a month (thank you, forgetting curve). We, on the other hand, lean into it.
Built for how employees work
Axonify’s approach to learning is based on decades of scientific research to drive knowledge retention, platform engagement and frontline enablement. Here’s how it works.
1. Fit into the workflow
The first step is to embed it into the flow of work. Everyone is busy on the job, especially people on the ground. They don’t have extra time for training. So we need to fit learning into the workflow.
That’s where microlearning comes in. Microlearning delivers content in short, focused and engaging bites that workers can consume in a few minutes a day, through devices people already use at work—including their own smartphones—to make it easier to fit into their busy day.
Let’s look at a few examples of how Axonify fits into the workflow:
In a retail store, shop floor staff access training at the start of every shift: clock in, Axonify, get to work. The session serves up the most important things they need to learn that day; in 3-5 minutes, they’re on the floor driving sales on your latest products and promotions.
In a grocery store, store associates do their daily burst of training before they start their shift. But they also have immediate access to on-demand resources so they can look up critical information in the moment of need (like how often the bananas need to be rotated).
In a bank, associates watch a short video on processes, like credit card pre-approval. Then, each day they answer a few questions to test their knowledge. Those quick moments of reinforcement drive confidence when cross-selling.
The sweet spot for Axonify use is 3-5 minutes. This is based on analysis of data from over 360,000 employees across 78 North American organizations, and nearly 4 million microlearning sessions.
2. Make learning fun
Fun fact: people love competition. Our leaderboard is the most popular screen in our platform because reward systems and competitive social mechanisms can have a great emotional and social impact on learners (plus, have you ever tried to get someone’s attention while they’re playing a game? Impossible, right?).
Axonify uses this technique to stimulate neural pathways in the brain, putting it in a state of “flow” and jump-starting memory retention. Plus, point, badge and reward incentives reduce “test anxiety” and motivates employees to engage in daily training in order to win individual and team challenges.
But we know that every worker is coming with different motivations—though they all want to do a good job. That’s why we use a blend of game mechanics to help people find their own motivations to log in every shift.
3. Personalize the experience
Like we said, every employee is different. Even two people who started on the same day and do the same job are going to need unique experiences. We use adaptive learning to personalise each employee’s experience using attributes like region and role—that would inform the training they need to complete. So when an employee logs into Axonify, our algorithm tells them “today, this is the most important thing for you to learn.”
Employees are always being served up the most critical training they need, and they know exactly how to spend their daily 3-5 minutes of learning. From there, employees can go even further and personalise their own experience by adding topics they’re interested in.
“Axonify’s innovative algorithm customises each employee’s learning path based on what they need most.”
– Jacob Little, Sr Manager of Organizational Effectiveness, Levi’s
4. Reinforce to retain
For your employees to retain what they learn and have it ready to apply in the moment of need, they need to be exposed to information repeatedly over time and then encouraged to retrieve it. This is how we start to work with our human nature to forget, versus against it: retrieving information from memory—even as few as two times—actually produces a memory trace that is resistant to forgetting.
That’s why we space out learning over multiple events, and use questions (like, a lot of questions) to encourage employees to retrieve the learning, again and again. Independent scientific research has shown that test-enhanced learning can improve retention by as much as 41% compared to testing, and properly designed multiple choice questions can trigger beneficial retrieval of both tested and related information.
To ensure employees are focusing on the most critical information, Axonify is measuring their progress over time, taking into account how their knowledge is growing, how they’re performing on the job, and how their confidence levels are growing, and then reinforcing the right topics at the right time using our intelligent algorithms and AI.
Axonify brain science explained by Dr. Alice Kim
“The science around the retention piece and creating habits is what drew us to Axonify and made us realise this is something we needed to invest in, something that would revolutionise the way we looked at training.”
– Carol Henry, Director of HR, Longo’s
5. Measure the impact
We make sure your staff know what they need to get things done. But if that doesn’t translate to serious business results, what was the point? Axonify is the only learning platform that can tie knowledge to behaviours and business results. While other learning platforms are tracking completion rates and test scores, we’re collecting more data. A lot more—on average, we collect over 5,000 pieces of data on each user per year as they engage in daily training.
That gets combined with business data and machine learning processes to uncover the true link between learning and business results. You’ll get real-time, actionable recommendations when a business target is at risk (like reconfiguring a learning path or adjusting content), ensuring that programs stay agile and responsive – and focused on tangible impacts.
Axonify: Built for workforces
When we say trust the process…we mean it. The Axonify method is science-backed, purpose-built and proven to drive real business results.