How much productivity is your company losing to e-mail?

One of biggest information technology companies in the world recently announced it is banning its employees from communicating internally via e-mail.   This is a rather ominous sign of what we believe is the fate of email as more and more companies adopt social technologies in the enterprise and embed these systems into their business practices.  I’m not saying this will happen next year, or even that email is dead- after all, a few of those pesky fax machines are still around and burning the proverbial midnight oil.  Same with the post office, though I hear snail mail volume is not what it used to be. A few thoughts on this move; First and foremost, this is a rather drastic step akin to quitting smoking cold-turkey that is not right for every business or every culture.  What this is however is a sign of things to come as social technologies mature and gain acceptance as business tools rather than distractions to productivity in the workplace.  Like every new technology, there was a period of cautious observation as early adopter organizations rushed in and began utilizing social tools for more than just marketing.  Then leading human resources leaders began to realize the potential of social technologies for recruiting top talent.  Now, in collaboration with leaders in the IT field, social technologies are creeping into many more parts of the enterprise- from CRM and internal communications, to risk management.

Secondly, notice how this step is being led directly by the CEO of the organization Thierry Breton.  The CEO you say?  Has he gone off the deep end?  I haven’t met Mr. Breton, but I can tell you he is blazing a trail for many, and your company may soon be following in his lead.  Driven by thought leaders deep inside organizations such as Luis Suarez at IBM, and a younger Generation Y who is entering the workforce with a bit of disdain for e-mail technology- the writing is on the wall for how companies will structure their internal communications in a social world.  No longer will email be allowed to burden our processing capacity with so many messages we simply do not need.

Finally, the benefits of going social for internal communications go beyond simply financial and far outweigh the cost of maintaining aging e-mail systems.  Of special note to leaders in the Human Resources profession is Mr. Breton’s internal analysis which found that on average, “only 15 out of every 100 internal e-mail messages were useful.”  The e-mail deluge was directly costing the company between 15 and 20 hours a week in lost productivity.  As a Human Resources professional, these figures should do more than simply alarm you; ask yourself, before your CEO does- How much productivity is your company losing to the deluge of e-mails that clutter internal communications every week?

Don’t go it alone either, collaborate with your IT leaders to calculate the number.  It should be a data-driven analysis; one that I suspect will be the foundation of a business case for you following in Mr. Breton’s footsteps.

- 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.

Training today. It's just different.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine- or so the saying goes. But the more things change the more they stay the same. It’s a matter of perspective. When I was a child my father worked for IBM. They had a dress code that was more like a uniform. It included a blue pinstripe suit, white shirt, and wingtip shoes. IBM was a post war company that besides revolutionizing the PC industry- developed some innovative HR practices in their day. They no longer have the strict dress code. They still have one, albeit arguably it’s just different. Today’s trends in learning are centered around social learning and media, web 2.0 technologies, the latest and greatest Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and authoring tools… But at the core of the conversation remains employee development, albeit arguably it’s just different. There remains the need for the application of sound instructional design and use of adult learning principles. Everything else is just the suit we wrap it in. In past years we wrapped training in the more formal blue pin stripe suit and wingtips. It was defined, it was a more formal event and we accessorized it accordingly. Today’s learner arrives with different expectations shaped by an upbringing influenced by the internet, mobile technology, Facebook, Wikipedia, and a host of other technologies that have accelerated the speed of business. They expect everything quicker and are far better at multitasking. So as professionals we have to speak to their needs and strengths.

Over the last two decades training has migrated from a formal classroom environment to elearning. There are two big causes for this; First is cost, I can develop an elearning course once and deliver it to thousands. Classroom training and its associated costs like travel, a physical venue, and room capacity is much more expensive to deliver to thousands. Then, when you factor in the remote workers formal training becomes prohibitively expensive to implement.

Regardless of the training methodology you predominantly use, your employees do train each other.  They also learn from others in the industry, they learn and improve upon their jobs all the time.

In a recent post from  CMS Wire, Deb Lavoy pointed out:

"Social Business" is not about technology, or about "corporate culture." It is a sociopolitical historical shift that is bigger, broader and much more fascinating.

Social Business is not about technology, or corporate culture…it’s about people doing what comes naturally to them. Learning from one another, and teaching one another.  That’s how humans are wired to pass on information.

-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.-

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.

Got Social?

Simon Sinek has a fabulous speech that he gave at one of the TED conferences discussing his philosophy Start With Why. Nothing could be closer to the truth when looking at ways to incorporate Social Technologies into the workplace. Web 2.0 tools are almost ubiquitous in our personal lives. We live, learn and play with these tools at home, and the generation entering the workplace will be demanding these tools to make their jobs easier and more fulfilling. In order for your employer brand to remain competitive, you'd be well advised not greet this new workforce with "oh, we have a policy against that here". You need to convene your Training, HR, and IT heads and strategize how these technologies fit, or not, with your culture's values. Then ask yourself, looking at your firm's goals-could adopting one of these technologies accelerate achievement of your goals or maybe even help you blow past your goals and into performance territory you never even dreamed possible? What stakeholders in your business would benefit the most from the use of these tools? Could your supply chain be streamlined or accelerated by better connecting your staff to your suppliers?

Look for KPI's in your organization that could be positively impacted by the introduction of one of these tools. It's important to do this in order to select the right tools for your culture, and to establish some baseline from which to measure benefits to your business. And I'm not just talking about ROI. Also, look for workflows or communication channels that could be streamlined by the introduction of one or more of these tools.

After you have defined your Why's for incorporating these tools, it's time to narrow down your selection... and boy what a range of possibilities you have available to you. We'll take a look at some of your options and their use in the business world next week.

- 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.

Two steps forward, one step back

I remember back in the day the anguish at receiving my FREE hundredth AOL CD-ROM in the mail. As if my mailbox didn’t already have enough junk in it. Back in the day, what a great repository of content AOL was. After about my 20^th CD-ROM in the mail, I actually made the switch from CompuServe to the AOL network which was growing in ubiquity. The anguish was in seeing how insanely great the AOL walled-garden of content was, yet how troubling that their databases weren’t intelligent enough to know that as a subscriber- I did not need another annoying CD-ROM in my mailbox!

Then came the big worldwide-open WWW, and these pay-for-access walled gardens quickly lost their appeal in favor of a more open ‘net. Everything was going to be out in the open, our content, our music, our photos, ourselves and even the architectural diagrams and maps to our military bases. Huh, you say? A funny thing happened along the way to our new open and more transparent lives. MySpace, Facebook, and many of the publicly available social networks came around and taught us the dangers of putting ourselves on the web so completely. Something similar is happening to many organizations today, as they realize that “putting it all out there” isn’t such a bright idea. This “one step back” is the realization that you must engage openly in this new frontier, but that when we all have an opportunity to share bits and bytes of our organizations with the outside world-we mustn’t do so with reckless abandon.

This brings me back to the walled gardens, not the old AOLs, but the new social walled gardens of content being rolled-out by leading companies. Leading organizations are replacing their aging intranets with more robust and collaborative social networks and content repositories. In effect, they’re leveraging the brainpower of their people in more intelligent ways than their competitors in the market. These organizations are outsmarting the competition by inserting all of the best that working socially has to offer, while maintaining the control and security that their data and the business requires. I’d say- that’s one smart step back!

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- 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.