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.

Social media access and device flexibility growing as HR tools

Cisco published a report recently with broad implications for Human Resources leaders that should be required reading for anyone in the profession. Of particular interest is Chapter 2 of their report “The Cisco Connected World Technology Report”, which summarizes key findings on “the challenges companies face in an increasingly mobile and security risk-prone world.” The study looked at employed end users in non-IT jobs, and college students between the ages of 18 – 29 years of age, and among other objectives sought to better understand the attitudes of this population with regard to issues such as “device flexibility” and “social media access” at work. We’ve been teaching companies to advance their human resources and IT policies to leverage the benefits of social tools employees are accustomed to using at home―in the workplace.

​This study by an industry giant validates much of what we have been teaching. There are lessons here for Human Resources leaders, as well as for Recruiters and Talent Management or Acquisition teams in these findings. That being said, I’d like to draw your attention to a few of the findings that I see will only grow in significance for HR pros during the coming years―

• Relative to End Users (33%) own experiences, a considerably larger proportion of College Students (64%) plan to ask prospective employers about their policy around social media and the use of personal devices in the workplace.
• About one-third of Students anticipate that flexibility, social media access or freedom to use personal devices at work will be more important than salary when accepting a job offer in the future.
• About 4 in 10 (41%) End Users recall that their company used a flexible device policy to attract new employees at the time they were hired.
• Over 1 in 4 (29%) College Students from the total sample, driven by those in Mexico and China, believe they would not join a company that did not allow their employees to access social media during work hours with company-issued devices.

Can you spot the trends in these findings? In our humble opinion, these trends provide clues as to the expectations of the generation now entering the workforce and replacing retiring baby boomers. For instance, this generation relies heavily on their personal learning network (PLN) and engages with this network via social media tools they have readily accessible at home ―and they expect to be able to tap into these resources at work. Is there room in your organization’s social media policies for this up and coming talent to access their PLN within boundaries permissible and aligned with your goals? If not, are the accommodations that could be made in your policy to balance the risk of social media usage by this population with the potential rewards to your company for allowing these actions? How can you supplement your current employee development plans with stretch development goals that encourage this population to reach out to his or her PLN for help? This is one way you could leverage their PLN to accelerate the employee’s growth without you having to invest additional training dollars or resources.

Human Resources leaders who covet that proverbial seat-at-the-table should ensure their social media policies aren’t limiting the potential benefits of social media use at their organizations to the marketing and sales teams. Much as we teach college students to prepare for an upcoming interview, Human Resources leaders should be coaching their talent acquisition teams to answer the following questions they are sure to face during interviews in the very near future― “What is your policy on employees accessing social media sites?” and “Do your policies allow for me to connect to the company’s network using my personal phone, iPad, laptop, etc.?” or “Can I access me personal email on the company’s issued device?”. Organizations that aren’t prepared to answer these questions might very well see themselves losing the proverbial war for talent or even worse―getting heckled for their poor preparation on these issues in one of today’s public and very social online forums!

Ready to talk about social media?​

- 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.

Three Major Social Media Policy Pitfalls to Avoid

This week, we learned of yet another firing of an employee for ranting about the customers he had to tolerate at his local Starbucks on a social media site. Starbucks isn’t the only company coping with the use of social media by its staff, and this is one of those thorny issues where the technology is clearly moving at net speed, and the law is slowly coming around at its usual snail’s pace. Organizations of all sizes are using social media tools to promote their products and services, yet their efforts are sometimes thwarted by employees airing the firm’s dirty laundry publicly via the use of these same sites. Tony Bingham, President of ASTD National, commented recently that just like the old 38 Special song-social media policies should be written so as to “Hold On Loosely, but don't let go…”. A very appropriate metaphor for how organizations can balance protecting their brands, yet not discourage the use of- or even worse, infringe on the free-speech rights of their employees. While we all await the long-arm of the law to clear things up, there are three major gaffes you want to avoid as an organization when crafting your social media policy.

There are many perspectives of what can and cannot be included in a well-crafted social media policy, but I’d like to review three of the major pitfalls that companies are making. First and foremost, overly-broad, vague, or policies encompassing too wide an array of behaviors are not holding up in courts or in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions. In one recent example of this, an employee was terminated from a hospital for “talking badly about the hospital”- which was, of course, against the institution’s social media policy (see pg. 19 of the NLRB GC’s Memo here).  Without a standard or clear definition as to what “talking bad about” or “criticizing” the organization means- the NLRB is erring on the side of employees in these cases. Any social media policy that does not clearly define these broad terms or limit their definition in a way that excludes protected National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) Section 7 activity will likely not pass the proverbial “smell test”, and should be corrected immediately.

Secondly, policies that infringe on employees right to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection” should be corrected. These behaviors include employees discussing amongst themselves their wages, work hours, other terms and conditions of their employment, up to and including criticisms by coworkers of the company’s performance and are protected under section 7 of the NLRA. While a company’s Pavlovian response might be to quickly terminate an employee for criticizing the organization in a social media forum, they would be well advised to review their social media policy with counsel before doing so to ensure the employee’s rights will not be violated as a result. A well-crafted policy is especially conscious of these rights, and is worded in accordance with its principle.

Lastly, social media policies should reflect the culture and values of an organization, and be written so as to not alienate the very talent companies are attempting to recruit via these same social media channels! Many of the policies we are encountering in the workplace are so hideously written that a talented, high-potential candidate might read them and run in the opposite direction. Gen Y now entering the workforce has grown up with this technology, and even developed a very powerful, vast and carefully crafted network of resources they can tap into when faced with a challenge. If your employer brand is communicating how innovative your organization is, and these high-potential candidates are arriving at your workplace and finding your policy overly restrictive of their ability to draw upon these resources―you are creating a huge disconnect with the image you are working so hard to cultivate. Policies written in legalese by your legal team, and not developed in conjunction with your Human Resources leader to be aligned with the organization’s talent management strategy will keep you out of the courtroom but may also keep you out of a high-potential market talent market.

- 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.

Maps as Training Tools

[caption id="attachment_574" align="alignleft" width="640" caption="By Kenbethea (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)"][/caption]Do you recall learning instructional design models by studying maps or flow charts such as this one?

How about your e-learning storyboards, do you map them out? How about mapping out branching scenarios to better communicate the learning path and different role play or e-learning scenarios for your client prior to commencing to develop a course?

Just last week, I met a law professor who maps legal concepts and processes in order to teach from them in his college courses. And, I've been working with a client for the past eight months who uses maps to teach electronic discovery to attorneys, records, managers, IT professionals, and others with some very detailed maps. We’ve developed some pretty neat instructional strategies for his maps in the online training courses I’ve built for him.

Back in college, I began mapping learning systems using an application called Inspiration that was readily available in the computer lab at Florida State University. Today's mind mapping software can do so much more; I'm surprised more instructional designers and OD practitioners don't share more of their "maps" with each other. The latest version of Mind Manager by Mindjet allows you to assign resources and deadlines to topics on your map- and then generates a GAANT chart view for you on-the-fly. Your client doesn't have a copy of the software you say? No problem, Mind Manager can publish an interactive mind map in .pdf format that includes an Adobe Flash player that allows anyone with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader to interact with your mind map without the ability to change the map.

In my consulting role, one of the more promising tools I’ve been working with during the last year is iThoughtsHD by CMS on the iPad (works on the iPhone as well, if your vision is better than mine). This $9.99 app available from the iTunes store should be a must carry for any pro working in-the-field conducting a needs analysis. You can map out a business process or performance bottleneck in a matter of minutes, and without skipping a beat email the .pdf to your client in order to confirm your analysis. I feel so strongly about this app, that if it were up to me I would hand this app out to new instructional designers as they were being conferred their degrees.

Maps have some amazing qualities that should be more readily exploited in both the classroom and out in the field by trainers, instructional designers, organizational development professionals, and even human resources leaders. When dealing with complex procedures or processes or trying to get everyone on the same page-they can be a vital communication tool for use with your clients. Maps bring people around them and are great for building consensus around best practices or performance interventions. Their visual appeal for teaching is well documented, and according to the law professor I met last week one of the best ways to communicate complex legal structures and processes. They are one of the best tools for leaders to “show the way forward” for any number of initiatives; one of the best examples of this was Churchill’s famous “Map Room” meetings with his troops as depicted in this video courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Are you using mind-mapping in your instructional design or organizational development practice? And, if so, how are you using them?

- 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.

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.