Learning with Facilitation affordances: the Case of Citizens' Advice Services

How can employees be qualified to provide sound customer advisory services? How can they be empowered to deliver the value of public sector modernization to customers? In this paper, we offer a novel approach to qualify service personnel on-the-job using “facilitation affordances”. In this approach, artifacts, providing appropriately designed facilitation affordances, are introduced into service personnel’s work practices. These facilitation artifacts invite them to start experiential learning, and, hence, to improve their advice giving behavior. To develop our approach, we followed a design research approach, here we developed a set of design requirements and, ultimately, five design principles for facilitation artifacts. We tested our approach in the context of citizens’ advice services in public administrations. We implemented a prototype facilitation artifact and conducted a user study with six real-world advisors and twelve clients. Our preliminary results show that the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach promises to enhance the service personnel’s skills that matter in modern public administrations. Furthermore, with the proposed qualification approach and the design principles for facilitation artifacts, we seek to deepen the knowledge on the importance of affordances for learning and, concurrently, provide practitioners with useful guidelines to implement the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach in their organizations.