At the end of this month we will be releasing our important new study on the future of corporate training:
High Impact Learning Practices: The Operating Guide to the Modern Enterprise Learning Function.
It is a companion piece to our High Impact Learning Organization study. This report is the result of 9 months of investigation into how modern High Impact Learning Organizations are thriving in the face of the tranformative forces for change in today's organizations and evolving to meet the chaning needs of their workforces.
I have had the pleasure of presenting highlights of our findings to the learning organizations in several companies recently, including Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell.
The folks at Booz Allen Hamilton submitted a few questions to me afterwards which I would like to share my answers to here:
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Are communities of practice a common element of the (social) learning environments/programs in the organizations that you have surveyed?
Yes – although maybe not explicitly named as such. Many of the social learning environments we have studied so far are essentially creating communities of practice (or communites of need) within a given learning audience, although they may not be using that name. The community of practice concept is an excellent source of guidance for the kinds of interactions that you would want to see within a social learning environment. Employees are participating in a community with other employees with like experiences, expertise, and business problems to solve.
The CoP idea is also useful because it helps to remind us that the desired behaviors are not technology-dependent. You can accomplish the same goals through completely in-person events. That’s a valuable lesson to remember as you construct a learning environment. The technology is secondary to the business needs of the employee participants and to the culture of learning in the organization.
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How do you create financial incentives for learning environments and reward behavior that encourages knowledge sharing?
Looking at best practices cases in companies like SUN, Best Buy, British Telecom, Qualcomm, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, behaviors are encouraged both explicitly and implicitly. The most obvious encouragement comes by having high profile business leaders and community managers lead by example. These environments are very public, and if key leaders are participating, the best and brightest within the organizatin will get the message and follow along. Employees will see particpation as a way to raise their own profile within the company as a whole, and will be naturally careful to contribute appropriately so as not to harm their reputation.
Of course the community manager role is critical as well. The community manager can instigate and reward activity through seed content, contests, and promotions. The community manager can track participant activity and choose to reward particularly frequent or useful contributions. Some of the technology platforms available to support these environments can assist by helping to track the reputation of users with other users as well as the overall rating of their contributions by the community at large. Your users will tell you who is most helpful to the community at large.
More systemic, some organizations bake the desired behaviors into job profiles and competency sets, so that employees are assessed and reviewed on related activity as part of the organizations performance management and development planning processes. If knowledge sharing is truly important to the organization, make it a core competency.
Lastly, underpinning all of these tactics for encourgaing participation is the culture of learning in the organization. Best practice learning organizations understand that part of their role is to cultivate a belief in knowledge sharing and collaboration across the organization.
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How are these environments being put together so as not to impose greater time requirements on employees as they integrate this learning environment into their jobs? In the end the employee is most responsible to get the everyday job done and already feels overwhelmed to keep up and fend for themselves.
This question speaks to a very important design principle for these environments. As much as possible, make access and participation as close to regular behavior as possible. Don’t put these environments out on island that requires special, non-routine actions on the part of the user. In practice, this principle could mean finding a platform that allows users to contribute (both as knowledge seekers and experts) via email instead of logging into the system. It could also mean embedding functional elements of the learning environment (e.g., search, latest posts on a topic, etc.) in systems and portals already in use by the employee population (via web services), again – to avoid requiring the employee to go out of his/her way to contribute.
For experts, find ways to manage their involvement. Some of the technology platforms that support these environments allow for balancing contact requests to experts or community leaders, so that any one expert only gets so many questions or contacts per day/week.
Lastly though, don’t forget that what you are trying to do here is take behaviors that were already happening (interacting with peers to solve business problems) and make them more effective. Spend some time finding out where social learning is already happening, and work to improve it. Ideally – you will not be adding to anyone’s to-do list, just making it easier for them to cross items off of it.
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In terms of talent management, what are the metrics that are being used to demonstrate the impact of informal learning?
This is a very important and interesting question. On its face, the goals of informal learning are the same as for formal. So a question back to you would be: what are the metrics that are being used to demonstrate the impact of formal learning? From our research so far, we’ve seen that the same metrics can and should apply to informal approaches. However, because informal is closer to work – and in many cases employees engage in it as a natural consequence of work, we have seen that it tends to force using business metrics more directly than does formal learning.
For instance, if you create a knowledge sharing environment to support your salesforce, the ultimate measures of success for the environment will be: are sales staff selling more? Faster? With better attachment rates? Are they able to put proposals together faster? Do they have quicker access to gathered expertise with regards to overcoming specific objections?
Are these sorts of metrics not why we really do corporate training in the first place?
As for the talent management component, competency assessments are the most logical place to see the long term impact of these environments. If they are working, then you should see increasing competence on the part of employees in those competencies which are truly critical to success.
These were great questions and seem to be on the minds of many organziations trying to get a handle on social and informal learning today. Thanks to Booz Allen for sharing. We address these topics and many more in: High Impact Learning Practices - The Operating Guide to the Modern Enterprise Learning Function. So be on the lookout for it very soon!
-David