A strategic collaboration
An ingenius development in workplace learning is helping to create communities of knowledge that empower individuals and the corporations they work for, says SkillSoft's Kevin Young
We are thought to be more intellectually engaged than ever before because of the internet; its ability to accelerate the flow of information and increase interaction has created innumerable opportunities to learn, communicate and collaborate. The social networking explosion has taken it even further, creating a proliferation of discrete communities of interest, driven by their need for information and propelled by their own momentum. The result has been unprecedented collaboration across many fields, resulting in the mass empowerment of individuals.
For an arresting example of this, simply look to the US health system where patients and carers are empowering themselves in record numbers. Over 80 million of them use social media for health issues, whether creating or contributing to health blogs, posting onto message boards or joining chat rooms, they are creating virtual health communities with the result that in 2009, the internet surpassed physicians as the USA's principal health resource for the first time. That's one powerful community, but it is also just one or many.
In the UK, similar viral activity is spreading, affecting not just consumers but their habits, interests, lifestyles and their workplaces. Two years ago, the only interest most employers had shown in social networking was to issue directives restricting the time staff could spend on Facebook. Today, they are developing policies aimed at leveraging social networking principles to drive business. Meanwhile, social media continues to transform the world of work as employees use it in ways their employers may not know about - yet may unwittingly benefit from.
There are almost certainly social media projects going on within large organisations - including your own - that are simply under the IT radar. But rather than stifle them, forward-thinking firms feed, encourage and learn from them, strategically turning staff social networking into corporate collaboration.
When one of the UK's biggest computer services companies wanted to find out what 22,000 of its staff were really thinking (as opposed to what they might tell the boss), they went straight to a social networking model to find out. "It was like a cross between a survey and Facebook," says Robert Humphreys, EMEA functional learning and development manager at CSC, the £1.5 billion British computer services giant. "What it gave us was not answers but discussion and we learned more about our staff behaviour than we could ever have discovered any other way," he adds.
CSC subscribes to Books24x7, the online reference library from SkillSoft for use by its subscribers. Through its relationships with over 500 publishers, SkillSoft takes thousands of non-fiction titles, digitises them and makes them available via an easy-to-use, online platform, the content of which expands almost daily. With all these benefits, Humphreys was puzzled by the low overall usage by employees.
Looking at CSC's utilisation of Books24x7 last year, Humphreys was interested to see the differences across Europe; usage in the German-speaking countries is about four times higher per capita than in the UK, and in India, people will queue in the street to get at training, whereas in much of Europe, you have to drag people to it. But cultural differences aside, usage looked too low. CSC already subscribed to e-learning and to Books24x7 on a global basis so it was effectively free at the point of delivery. To maximise the investment they'd made in training, he needed to get to the bottom of it.
To find out what staff thought about Books24x7, he devised a hybrid-style research programme based on the principles of social networking. He ran what was effectively an unstructured survey with inbuilt social networking functions which, conducted via the web, encouraged staff to start discussing e-learning amongst themselves. They posed five key challenges to UK employees on why they were not using e-learning.
What came back was a general lack of awareness of what was available from e-learning or how to access it, together with an overriding concern about whether managers would let them learn on company time. Dialogue emerged like: "...my manager won't let me do this sort of thing" and: "...I'm expected to do it in my own time.
By strategically probing the thinking behind staff attitudes and actions, CSC found it was easier to prescriptively address these issues - in this case, taking steps to ensure the e-learning portal was both highly visible and highly accessible - key drivers of successful uptake.
But whilst e-learning provides a fast, effective, low cost means of delivering staff learning, it is the bolt on of collaboration - through user-generated content - where the real magic happens. By incorporating a collaborative module as part of an organisation's staff learning resources, it is possible to extend the value of trusted expert information by surrounding it with the knowledge and expertise of its employees.
Unlike standalone social networking applications that can lack business focus, a tailored collaborative module - like SkillSoft's inGenius - can build on existing e-learning content to foster a serious contribution to the corporate knowledge base.
Building a social networking style user community in the workplace can effectively connect thousands of employees via a forum where they can talk and support one another, solve problems share ideas, archive solutions and build a whole new interconnected culture, ultimately for the corporate good. Given the speed of growth in social media it's probably already happening in a company very near you.
Created on: 17-Jan-11 13:31
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