MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

How to Use Twitter to Share Culture

Everyone has been hearing about the importance of social media. Yet I think the hurdle that most businesses face when entering this new arena is how to make the most of what social media has to offer. I saw a great article on Mashable.com that gives some ideas for using twitter to share corporate culture.

• Tweet events such as company awards or entering new markets

• Share corporate mission by tweeting about goals or upcoming plans

• Provide industry insight by tweeting about things that impact anyone in that sector such as legislation or educational information

• Recognize employees by tweeting about benefits and employee achievements

• Highlight customer successes such as awards they've won or how they've used your product/service to achieve a goal

• Use tweets as a customer service tool to answer hot questions publicly and quickly

• Ask questions to your customers and prospects

Twitter can be used to promote your learning program using many of these If the goal is to create a culture of learning, then use social media tools to share that culture and keep employees engaged. Thoughts on what to tweet include:

• New topics or learning tools which have been made available to employees

• Reminders about job aids that apply to a current issue many employees are facing

• Provide updates on long-term L&D projects

• Use as a service tool to quickly answer questions on a new program

• Share how L&D fits into and forwards company goals

• Ask questions of employees on what they’d like to see in their training program

I’m sure there’s more ways to use Twitter to keep employees engaged and excited about their learning options. What others can you think of?

Is Preboarding the New Onboarding?

Formerly known as new employee training, onboarding programs have become standard in many companies. The idea of onboarding is to get new employees productive and integrated into the culture as quickly as possible. 

Workforce Management recently featured a story on a company that is taking onboarding to the next level. Booz Allen Hamilton plans to add 5,000 new jobs by the end of this year. With the number of new employees, they decided to overhaul their onboarding program. Now Booz Allen Hamilton delivers training and developmental tools to employees from the moment they accept a job offer. The new process is referred to as “preboarding.”

The idea is consistent with onboarding, but takes it to its logical conclusion. Get new hires engaged, excited and on the way to productivity before they start their first day. During preboarding employees are directed to a web portal where they can access:

• Job information
• Early learning activities
• Company information
• Internal social media and collaboration tools

I think Booz Allen Hamilton has the right idea. E-learning is widespread in the corporate environment. Social media and online collaboration tools are on the rise. Why not allow new hires to access your training tools and develop a personalized curriculum prior to their first day? Why not give them access to the internal collaboration tools they’ll use on the job? Why not give them a way to start interacting with their new colleagues?

Think of the benefits a company can reap by utilizing the time between job offer and start date to develop new hire skills and integrate them into the culture. A time when most people’s enthusiasm and job commitment is at its highest. Some obvious benefits include:

• New hires at full productivity days sooner
• Reduced turnover within the first year
• Employees who are more engaged from the beginning

What other benefits do you see? Is your company using preboarding?

Are You Talking to Non-Students?

You know who I mean. The employee who won’t take a second of training unless it’s mandated. The manager who discounts training as a distraction from “real work.” The non-students. If you talk to them, they’ll give you gold for your learning program. But you’ll have to dig for it.

I’ll grant that it’s more fun to talk to the converted. They want to talk about how great the program is and ways to improve it. And that’s good information that you should seek out. But non-students are where the real gold is. To paraphrase a blog post from Adele Revella, the people who are already using your program are going to talk about using criteria. To determine what you need to influence non-students you don’t need using criteria – you need buying criteria. And that’s what talking to non-students will give you.

If they say it’s too time-consuming get them to talk about what results they would expect training to achieve. If they say it’s too complex find out how they assessed ease of use. If it’s too expensive find out how they evaluate return on investment.

It’s not just about making changes to the program, although the information you gather may lead to changes that you wouldn’t have thought of by only talking to students. It’s also about finding out what criteria non-students value most so that you can communicate in a way that speaks to your buying audience. And that’s part of what all learning managers have to do in order to market their program and sell their value.

How often to you speak to non-students? Do you dig for the gold of what it is they value?

Maximize the Power of E-mail in Your Learning Program

Last week I saw an interesting post on Duct Tape Marketing that advocated using e-mail to supplement staff training. In the example, each new hire is enrolled in an auto-responder program that delivers e-mails over the first 90 days of employment. Jantsch comes from a marketing perspective and suggests covering topics such as product and service information, customer success stories, and features on other employees.

This idea is simple, but powerful. And its applications go way beyond marketing. E-mail is different from all other communications because it is personal. As learning professionals we can capitalize on that, and use e-mail to tailor messaging to students that are otherwise handled en-masse via LMS systems. Here are some initial thoughts, though the teaching applications extend beyond this list. The beauty is that the content can be easily customized to particular learning needs and delivered at specific times.

·        Jantsch is right. Use e-mail to stay close to new hires through their first 90-120 days. Give them additional information about the company, its offerings and other employees.

·        Have students that are following a particular curriculum in your LMS? Don’t just use e-mail to remind students to log into the system. Give highlights of upcoming topics and provide quick reviews.

·        Did you recently have company-wide training on a particular topic? Use e-mails to deliver a job-aid which everyone can use to implement their new skills.

·        Promote someone into management? Use e-mails to help them navigate their transition and share the tools that are available to help grow their skills.

Automated e-mail systems make it easier than ever to speak directly to your students in a way that is personal and tailored to their learning situation. What other applications do you see?

Managers are key to building successful training

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your sources. In training, I think the 20% is easily the front-line managers in your company. And today seems to be a day to reinforce that thought.

Josh Bersin posted on his blog about the proof his analysts have been gathering that coaching and development is one of the keys to the economic success of a company.

Because over the long run ..., businesses succeed through their ability to adapt, learn, and move people from job to job.  Without a strong culture and set of processes to coach and develop people, this becomes very difficult.

Clive Shepherd wrote today, too, that managers will determine the success of learning and development.

The lesson from all this evidence is quite clear. Unless you recognise that line managers are your most important stakeholder and ensure their commitment to your l&d strategy, you stand little chance of success.

It's important for the people you're teaching to know what they should be gaining from their training programs, how it will be used in their everyday jobs, and how it can impact their business. And it's critical, vital, crucial for their managers to know the same thing. I think that if you focus on that 20% of your audience, you'll see 80% return on your investment. How do you get managers involved with your training programs?

How Learning Impacts Engagement

A 2008 Gallup poll revealed that only 29 percent of employees are engaged in their jobs. Let’s look at that number again. Less than one third of workers are actively engaged in their jobs, looking for ways to improve their productivity, or contributing to the organization in an effective way.

The Human Capital Institute released research earlier this year entitled “The Return on Engagement” which reports the tremendous cost of having the majority of the workforce disengaged. In total, employee disengagement is estimated to cost the US economy as much as 350 billion dollars per year in lost productivity, accidents, theft and turnover.

Clearly those that disregard the importance of employee engagement do so at their peril. The corollary is also true. Those organizations that can create higher employee engagement will enjoy a significant advantage over their competition. Learning organizations can be key partners in making that happen.

Take one important component of engagement. A 2008 study by ASTD research showed that good relationships between employees and immediate supervisors are THE key driver in employee engagement. How key? 91 percent – nearly all – respondents indicated the relationship with their immediate supervisor drove their engagement level to a high or very high extent. Leadership development programs can play a big role in keeping engagement high by improving supervisory skills. To the extent that training programs improve the climate, the organization will enjoy the engagement advantage.

What other drivers of engagement do you think learning organizations can influence the most?

New e-learning courses on cross-cultural business, PMP 2009, Visio, and more

New courses have arrived in the MindLeaders course catalog! The new topics include the latest PMP certification, tips for doing global business with Chinese and Indian companies, how to use Visio 2007, and the Security+ 2008 and MCTS 70-432 certification tests.

• CompTIA Security+ 2008 (SY0-201)
• Doing Business in China: A Cultural Approach
• Doing Business in India: A Cultural Approach
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Maintenance MCTS 70-432
• Project Management Professional Certification 2009
• Visio 2007

Our two "Doing Business in..." courses are specially designed to help people get information fast before a business trip, conference call, or any other kind of meeting with a Chinese or Indian company. Each of these courses offer fast tips for meetings, business meals, and general protocol.

Each lesson begins with a video introduction to the most important facts; students can watch only the video to get the information as quickly as possible, or can go on into the lesson to get more details about the customs and etiquette involved.

If you have a subscription to MindLeaders courses, these are already in your course lists. Please let us know any comments or suggestions that you have!

Are We Teaching the Critical Skills?

I read an interesting blog post from Seth Godin the other day. It was written several years ago, but nothing has changed that would invalidate the content. In it he describes a three hour flight where he watched a guy write a report using hunt and peck, and then came home to find out his third grader is being drilled in how to write proper cursive.

The argument: Cursive is a useless skill in today’s world. Typing, on the other hand, is a critical skill.

Of course, we’ve always taught cursive in school. And that’s the problem. It’s been a long time since a school curriculum has been created from scratch. If we were doing that now would cursive be so high on the list?

To effectively train our organizations and be viewed as essential to business success (vs. drilling how to write proper cursive), learning programs have to be really good at teaching the critical skills. What skills are most fundamental to your organization’s success this year? How are you filling the gap?

How Do You Facilitate Informal Learning?

According to a recent article in Training Industry Quarterly, only 20% of employee learning takes place in a formalized setting. The other 80% occurs informally on-the-job. Formal learning still has a place within corporate learning programs, especially for teaching employees brand new skills. However, understanding and capitalizing on how informal learning is increasingly important. The article places most informal learning in three different categories:

·        On Demand Learning, which includes e-learning, simulations, books and reference materials

·        Social Learning, which includes workshops, breakout sessions, wikis, quality councils, blogs, and instant messaging

·        Embedded Learning, which include job aids, help systems, reference cards, and online FAQs

A couple of things that all of these have in common:

·        They are learner-driven. Learners decide the medium of choice, the pace, the content covered, who they converse with, and where the learning happens.

·        Technology enables and formalizes informal learning. According to a recent article on CFO.com, the use of social networks and wikis within companies doubled between 2007 and 2008.

·        Most informal learning is lower-cost than traditional formal learning programs.

·        Each category has an on demand element. Wikis can be searched. Job aids and FAQs can be referenced on the fly. Instant messaging allows for immediate answers.

Informal learning will continue to happen within all organizations, and technology is expanding the ways employees can share information. The challenge for learning organizations is to formally acknowledge and facilitate informal learning within their company’s culture. How is your learning organization formalizing this valuable transfer of knowledge?