Are learning coaches roaming your company's halls?

In reading this article aptly titled “Schools’ instructional coaches change the game”, I was struck by the following observation:

“… instructional coaches were originally launched to help school districts strengthen professional development to meet the needs of all learners.”

The schools are getting in on the learning coach action, and as we noted in a previous blog- we feel instructional designers must do the same. Today’s workforce, with its five generations collaborating physically and virtually to accomplish the mission, has needs that cannot be efficiently met by bottlenecking “training” within the confines of human resources.

Similarly to the classroom in the article, some of these needs include:

1. Guidance in interpreting performance data for their team and identifying knowledge/ skills gaps,
2. Working collaboratively to spread best practices across job functions and roles,
3. Disseminating instructional methods, design principles, and adult learning theories, and
4. Establishing communities of practice and learning networks within the enterprise.

This learning coach strategy shifts the onus for learning to everyone’s shoulders in the organization. Learning should be a competency in everybody’s job description―and everyone should be measured on how well they learned and applied their new knowledge, skills and abilities to execute their jobs. It should be the learning coaches leading this charge, and stepping outside of their traditional classroom or design roles and weaving learning into the work flows of their organizations.

Much as improvements are being witnessed during early test of this tactic in school settings, organizations and in particular human resources executives should be experimenting with roving learning coaches as well.

- 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.

Learning via microblogging in the Enterprise

Learning via microblogging in the EnterpriseIs learning at your organization stuck in traffic logjams in what was supposed to be your company's information superhighway? Want to kick it in to high gear? Fight the urge to join the endless email chains and conversation threads and cut right through the muck with microblogging!

Microblogging is dramatically altering the way information is consumed. In essence, a microblog is a smaller version of a standard web blog. When we say smaller, we mean much smaller- you typically have 140-400 characters or less to get your point across quickly and succinctly. Microblog entries are labeled by the social network and its administrator, to reflect the information it is encouraging community members to share. You may have heard of them called “status updates”, “tweets”, or simply “messages”.

In an enterprise setting, a company might label microblog posts as “project updates”, “bright ideas”, “customer feedback”, or even “what would you improve around here?” in 140-400 characters or less, of course. Via these small messages, users can broadcast ideas, updates, images, and links to pre-recorded media like podcasts or videos. Furthermore, posts by users can be indexed by the use of hashtags (“#” symbols) so that they can be easily searched for in the future. One-to-many conversations can take place in real-time, regardless of geographic boundaries.

The technology provides an informal collaborative environment that can streamline the flow of information for your organization, its partners and suppliers. Experimenting with this technology is relatively inexpensive, and there are several open-source platforms on the market that you should review carefully. Your goals and budget obviously play a large part in your selection process, but so should considerations such as how much customization your organization demands and whether or not your users will find a more bare bones feature set attractive.

Many organizations are crafting learning experiences using micro-blogging tools, and productivity gains have been documented by several organizations. The Harvard Buisiness Review has a nice chronicle of a few of these written by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd, two trailblazers in the implementation of social media tools to advance learning and development (L&D) objectives.

While much focus remains on the marketing and crisis management potential of microblogging technology, less has been written about its potential to teach and enable learning in the enterprise. Yet early adopters in several industries are finding success at invigorating learning at their organizations with this technology, and we feel its potential to transform how L&D initiatives are carried out hasn’t even been scratched. Treading carefully, it’s time for Human Resources to lead this charge!

- 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.

Give your people a face

You have utilized team building exercises, company picnics and outings, trained your managers to provide praise, spent a lot of money on corporate retreats and still you sense some disengagement within the troops. Frustrating isn't it? Not even the company's intranet or online employee directory has truly "connected" everyone. You might even say you have "Facebook envy" at how quickly the public social networking site has managed to connect and keep so many folks engaged in such short order. Why is that? Finding ways for employees to connect and remain connected is always a challenge, its what we call engaged in the HR business.  Keeping them connected when they don’t interact frequently is even more challenging. One modern way to create better connections is to provide each employee a user profile that facilitates and personalizes these connections. Think of it as putting the Human back in your human resources. Their user profile can contain their name, photo, position or title, contact info, office they work in, responsibilities, area of expertise, blogs, or anything else you deem necessary to strengthen these connections.  This alone is a step above and beyond the old Excel spreadsheets with everyone's telephone extension and email address … it allows for two fellow employees who don’t really know each other to feel like they know more about their teammate than in olden days. But let's face it, this alone won't do it.

[caption id="attachment_438" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="User Profile sample"][/caption]

What keeps people connected and primed to remain engaged is the ability to stay up-to-date with what their peers are doing, what they're working on, etc. relatively quickly. This is the addiction to social media in a nutshell! This technology is enabling CNN's "24-hour news cycle" at the personal communications level. Online directories are relatively static, except for when the admin goes in to remove names and contact information of those that have left the firm. User profiles are dynamic, self-administered, and engaging by their very nature.

What business reasons would you justify implementing user profiles vs. online directories:

• First and foremost, to push the onus of maintaining updated information to the employee, and away from HR or IT's hands; decentralization and democratization of the data.
• To establish a place for employees to engage with like-minded peers, not simply look each other up.
• To allow employees to "connect", "like", or "follow" their peers regardless of geographical or professional boundaries.
• To search for shared expertise, favorite bookmarks, common interests or ideas; a virtual suggestion box or water-cooler.
• To reduce on-boarding time for new hires.

Many of the lessons of the past few years that apply to the rise of social media platforms port over well to enterprise social networks, and should not be overlooked. Additionally, many users have become accustomed to using these profiles in their personal lives, and will be expecting to leverage the technology in their professional endeavors. Can you think of some of the other benefits that implementing user profiles would have for your organization?

-Steven Hornak

Steven 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 their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Steven can be reached at 305-791-1764, steve@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter @smhornak.-

A picture is worth a 1000 words

As many organizations are looking to cut costs, training is often quick to be placed on the cutting block.  In the past many organizations transitioned from classroom training to e-learning which promised cost savings in design and delivery time.  However, as budgets tighten further, organizations are looking for even more cost effective ways to train their employees.  Many are looking into more on-the-job training, coaching and mentor solutions. Napoleon said “Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours” which translates into a picture is worth a 1000 words.  If this holds true, then a short video is worth millions of words.  Video is a great format for delivering training, and production costs have dropped dramatically in recent years.  In today's "reality TV" dominated world, expensive training video productions of yesteryear are no longer realistic or necessary.  How do we incorporate today’s technology into our training?  And how do we "democratize" it from emanating from the training department to a tool the front lines of our businesses can use?

The simple answer is to empower your employees to shoot video and provide them with a platform for sharing  it.  Using video appropriately enables your employees to contribute to the community that is your organization.  It allows those who are best at demonstrating their expertise in executing a business process to teach others and develop these skills in their peers.  This way, instead of being paired up with one or two people to deliver on the job training, employees are exposed to the best the organization has from wherever that may be in the organization.  The best part of collecting these videos is that over time you develop a searchable archive.  Then, as your experienced workers retire or leave, their contributions stay with the organization.

Many are concerned about privacy and security using the public video sharing services.  But organizations are finding it very affordable to install their own platform to share, comment and discuss video demonstrations.  The first step is to overcome the fear of allowing employees the power to have a voice within the organization.  Leverage the power of social learning through employee videos, and you'll wonder why it took you so long to employ this strategy!

____________________________________________________________________- 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 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.

Social networks, not always a Field of Dreams

Many organizations are implementing policies to manage employee interaction with social media in the work place.  However, leading organizations are implementing their own social platforms.  These platforms feature the same communication tools that the big social websites offer, connecting person to person.   But these organizations are using them to increase the type and quality of communications among employees via internal Blogs, Wikis and through sharing documents and information.   But the real secret to their success lies in their execution. The predecessor to the enterprise social network was the intranet.  The difference between today’s technology and yesterday’s intranet was in the complexity for the user.  The corporate intranet was far more complex to use and required a much steeper learning curve.  Because of this complexity many had difficulty properly executing and maintaining its use.  Employees were often forced to use it.  Many, due to its shortcomings came to rely on email to serve as there document share, their data collection and communication tool.

So how does an organization ensure proper execution of their new social platform?  First you have to realize that today’s social platform is not like yesterdays complicated intranet.  Your employees already engage on social networks.  They are all, whether there a public or an enterprise social network, user friendly.  There is no better example of their ease of use than the growth in the number of grandparents who are connecting online with their kids and grandkids.

Believing that execution is easy would be shortsighted.  It’s not without it’s own challenges.  As an organization implements theirs they need to make certain that it’s done correctly.  It does take a change in the thinking of the employee and many are reluctant to change their emailing ways.  That old adage of “If you build it they will come” does not hold true without good relevant content.  Content is what drives social media.   Don't make the mistake of launching a bare social network.  A core group of supportive users will develop the initial content enabling a larger roll out.  Driving and developing this early content is where proper execution lies and it can easily fail.  A controlled roll-out within an organization so that the platform develops naturally, with guidance, is the best plan for success.

Through proper execution the platform will take off within your organization.   It will deliver an increase in the quality of communications and idea sharing that cannot be measured in dollars.  As Jef Vandecruys, Global Project Leader Digital Connection said:

“It is important to measure the actual implementation of social media in projects.  It’s not just the theory that matters; the true value is in the execution.  The very first KPI of 'social' is not about monetary value, it’s measuring the evolutions in the internal knowledge.”