Training is key to leveraging social media for building brand value!

If you take it at face value that leadership is influence, then you best be influencing your employees use of social media before you are influenced by it in ways you may or may not like. As an HR professional, were trained to manage and mitigate the risks of our employees’ actions to our organizations. For many this has led to the knee-jerk reaction of banning social media in the workplace altogether, as if we were some rogue dictatorship of a country like Syria or Cuba. Yet as the Turkish prime minister has recently discovered, blocking your people’s access to social media is about as futile as attempting to prevent a flood by covering the cracks in your dam with your hands.

More forward thinking organizations are coming to this realization sooner than their less progressive counterparts, and are taking the social media bull by the horns. MasterCard is an example, is one such organization. And at the heart of their strategy, what I would consider a major factor in their successful adoption of social media as an organization is training. This piece by Jeanne Meister highlights some of the steps the company has taken in recent years to actively influence their employees use of social media, and turn them into brand ambassadors.

Many of the steps the company is taking such as building a training and communications plan, posting in person social media training sessions at offices around the globe, distributing short educational videos via social media channels, and using reverse mentors (where younger millennial generation employees mentor older senior executives) to get them up to speed on the latest social media platforms and trends are all training and organizational development strategies we can all implement and utilize to lead similar efforts ourselves.

I would go as far as to tell you that not only can you turn your employees into brand ambassadors using some of these techniques, but go beyond and convert your best customers into brand ambassadors leveraging some of these strategies and tactics. Engage your employees, your investors and owners, and your customer base. Encourage your customers to post pictures and videos of themselves using and enjoying your products. Have your communications and marketing teams reach out to these customers, and get the stories behind their pictures and videos; these customers are telling the story of your brand- get their permission to highlight their excitement and enjoyment when using your products and services on your site. Bring attention to their efforts, and turn them from fans of your products and services to ambassadors!

There are just two roads you can travel to success in today’s digital and socially connected business climate. You can either lead with social media, or be led by it. 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

New years are filled with opportunity, just like new hires...

Every new year brings with it the opportunity to briefly look back and take stock of the past one. What better place to start this review than by reviewing the effectiveness of your new employee onboarding program? After all, a solid onboarding program is key to one of the most import new beginnings not just for your new team member but for your organization as well. 

At many organizations, employee on boarding involves indoctrinating the new hire into the corporate culture. New employees typically learn about the company's history, mission, vision, its founders, organizational structure, and generally how the organization operates. This has become a pretty standard modus operandi, with trainers routinely scheduling these sessions to bring new hires into the company fold. At many organizations, this onboarding is a one-way street, with the organization information-dumping as much information about the company as possible in as little a time as allowed into the new hire. Not surprising is the fact that many organizations who employ these run-of-the-mill onboarding programs measure their success by how much knowledge the new hire acquired about the organization. Barely a level two evaluation by Kirkpatrick's standards, and pretty low expectations.

Ask many managers and corporate leaders what they value most about hiring "outsiders" and many will report valuing the "new perspective" an outsider to the organization brings to the table. Trouble is, most new hires from the "outside" are hired and almost immediately indoctrinated in the company's ways. Not so at one organization who recognized this dichotomy. Wipro, which provides telephone and online chat support for a global customer base, tried something different and was able to achieve a more than 32% reduction in turnover during an employees' tenure with a new onboarding strategy. Additionally, customers' reported receiving significantly better service from employees that went through this new onboarding program. 

Wipro placed a heavy focus on individuals being able to perform in line with their individual strengths. This new "Personal-Identity Socialization" onboarding program allowed new hires to play to their strengths, and even bolstered the self-esteem of employees who participated in the new approach. You can read more about Wipro's innovative approach to new hire onboarding, and see if you may want to incorporate parts of their strategy by visiting this link. 

These are the out-of-the-box experiments in HR that lead to significant performance and productivity gains for organizations, and where HR truly has an opportunity to earn a seat at the proverbial table. When was the last time you looked at your new hire onboarding program? Are you simply measuring how much information sticks in their heads, or, are you demanding more of your investment dollars when it comes to onboarding your people? Let us know, we want to hear from you!

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How the xAPI can improve your training ROI calculations

How many times have you been asked to calculate the value or the return on investment (ROI) your training programs are delivering?  Unless your client is okay with "real-world" back-of-the-napkin calculations, you'll need to demonstrate some objective metrics and be prepared to defend them.  It's time you get better at showing your worth, and the new Experience API (a.k.a. the xAPI, or Tin Can API) can assist-if used properly.   Prior to the xAPI's existence, your data collection was limited to what data you could track inside of your learning management system (LMS), and whatever test scores or attendance records you were keeping if you do not yet have an LMS or are still using a spreadsheet. 

Enter the xAPI, now you can include all sorts of offline activities such as conference attendance, coaching and mentoring sessions, and pretty much anything you can condense into the xAPI statement structure of nouns, verbs and objects.  Even successful activities performed on a CPR dummy or carrying a heavy hose out of a simulated burning building can now be tracked as a development activity.  In other words, your universe of learning activities that are contributing to a positive ROI for your efforts just expanded infinitely to what big data folks call N=ALL.  You can now track ALL learning activities, online or off, in front of a computer, iPad, crash test dummy, or an instructor that your learners are learning from in your analysis!

Let me give you an example of how this benefits you.  A year ago, you would have sent an employee needing to develop his or her presentation skills to a class or offered coaching by a consultant in order to develop their skills.  You had no way to track his attendance at local Toast Master meetings, his or her reading a book by a noted author on the subject, or delivering prepared remarks at a local public school or charity as a part of their developmental experiences.  Now, you can track all of these experiences and include them in your analysis of what led to the employee's improved public speaking skills.  In the case of an employee delivering prepared remarks at a local public school for example, your cost for said experience was $0, yet surely you can estimate some benefit derived from the experience in your ROI calculations. 

You see, to improve the accuracy of any ROI measurement, it is necessary to develop as complete as possible picture of the learning and development activities your learners experienced that led to the improved performance.  The more experiences and activities you include, the stronger the inference you can make as to their value in your ROI calculations.  And if you and your team are enabling these experiences, you can estimate their worth in your ROI calculations!

 The xAPI provides improved visibility and transparency into the activities of your learners, which in turn can improve performance across individuals and teams if multiplied and positively impact your ROI calculations.

 
Additional resources you may want to review when calculating the ROI of your training initiatives:
1. Summary Process for measuring ROI of Training
2. The Direct Path to Training ROI

Have a resource for measuring the ROI of training that is not listed here?  Please feel free to include it in the comments, the above are provided to get the conversation started! 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.