Dimensions UK is a British not-for-profit, charitable registered society and housing association with the goal of supporting people with learning disabilities and complex needs. It was founded in 1976 and has a staff of 7000+ people across the United Kingdom. The Dimensions group also includes Discovery and Waymarks, both of which share the same vision as Dimensions UK.
“My experience in working with Whatfix has been excellent. I’ve found their account and customer success team to be very helpful and clear. They’ve taken the time to understand our needs and goals and have helped us on that journey. They’ve also had a great focus on coaching and empowering my team, at a pace that meets our needs, to work with Whatfix.”
The Challenge of Adoption and Engagement on Iplanit
Dimensions UK invested in a new system called Iplanit to enable a new model of supporting people, called Activate. Activate is a way of supporting people that is evidence 0based and outcome-focused. ‘Activate’ has been seen to increase meaningful activity by 25% and, for people who experience them, lowers challenging behaviours by 60%. With Activate, Dimensions enables the people they support to live as active citizens, playing their part in our communities. Iplanit is the main system which supports this model. Iplanit would help to document individuals’ preferences and needs (such as morning routine) and medications so that a support team, even new colleagues, would know how to provide the best support.
In short, Iplanit would help Dimensions UK ensure that the people they support lead engaged and full lives. The benefit of Iplanit is heavily dependent on how diligently and accurately support workers enter information into it. The initial training on Iplanit wasn’t successful due to several limitations, such as low IT literacy within the organisation. Since support workers did not feel empowered enough to use Iplanit they hesitated to adopt the software.
Reasons for Choosing Whatfix
Dimensions UK chose Whatfix for the following reasons:
- Ease of Use: Super-easy to create content, with no dependence on IT
- Easy to do Business With: Open, great customer service, and worked with partner organization for integration
- Comprehensive Digital Guidance: With 6+ widgets, more ways to help and train users versus other platforms.
Learning by Doing with Whatfix
While Dimensions UK is considered a leader in using technology to improve people’s lives, poor user adoption was affecting its goals. TheDimensions L&D team started looking for creative and innovative ways to solve this and found Whatfix.
In-Application Microlearning: With Whatfix, Dimensions UK was able to promote learning and doing at the same time. Live training helped overcome user resistance, as they felt more confident in using Iplanit with walk throughs that don’t just guide, but also help complete activities in real time. As users started entering data with more discipline and data quality increased, Iplanit became the treasure of information it was desired to be. Starting with activities such as daily record-creating, to adding key tasks, L&D will use Whatfix to enable management soon.
Self-Service Help: Whenever support workers are stuck in Iplanit, they turn to Whatfix Self Help for answers, which provides them with actionable and contextual information relevant to the page they are on. Dimensions aggregates information from various sources across the company to provide personalized help to support workers, establishing trust. Dimensions UK will also have its IT helpdesk use Whatfix walkthroughs to solve support issues.
Multi-format Training Content: With a system that gets upgraded every three months, keeping training up-to-date can run into days. However, with Whatfix, the L&D department is able to develop content during the software testing phase, thereby making sure that the most recent and accurate training is available as the updates go-live. Also, Whatfix multiformats get auto-updated every time a corresponding walkthrough is changed. Multi-format content displayed as videos, slideshows, and PDFs enables users to train in their preferred medium.
Dimensions UK is currently evaluating Whatfix for helping drive the adoption of their internally designed system dealing with all of its rotas, payroll and HR functions.
“Our main ‘aha’ moment came from a colleague in one of our sister companies when they said, “Can we have Whatfix digital guidance on our time management portal too?” It showed us they saw the value Whatfix adds and how straightforward it is.”
