An increasing desire to incorporate social media in corporate learning has garnered lot of attention at recent conferences and in trade publications. Many early efforts have borrowed from consumer social media models such as Facebook and YouTube. Early adopters rushed to co-opt various social media look-alikes in closed networks behind the corporate firewall. Media 1 has even helped with a few of these implementations using SharePoint™-based solutions.

Some have gleaned positive results—including reduced travel costs, increased global connectivity, and improved access to just-in-time learning and job aids. Other well-meaning efforts attracted a flurry of early activity; then withered on the vine.

Why do some social learning sites take off while others fail to thrive? To answer this question, we took a closer look at some of our client’s social learning efforts to see if we could uncover any obvious patterns or trends.

Failure to Thrive?

Many Communities of Practice and general purpose social communication portals tend to burn strong at rollout, but fade fast. Well-timed promotion and curiosity drive early traffic to social sites that may not stick. Usage of YouTube-like media share portals, while valuable performance support and reference tools, may also trend downward over time. (And, in an interesting twist, participants also tend to shy away from rating corporate media—especially clips posted by superiors—despite what we might expect based on ratings in consumer sites like Amazon and Trip Advisor.)

It’s not that corporate community sites in general don’t work; some communities do indeed grow over time. It’s just that establishing a social media site on its own doesn’t guarantee social learning success. Research shows that people are motivated to share knowledge (or not) for a number of complicated reasons, including deeply rooted cultural factors such as trust, recognition, and internal competition. Enabling social technology alone does not provide or support motivation to actually use the site over time.

In sharp contrast, social learning frameworks for cohort learning programs tend to be universally well-received, with most social media features utilized by participants throughout their tenure in the program. The very nature of cohort learning—in which a select group of participants start and finish a course together—promotes a group bond and trust through participation in shared experiences over time. Coaches provide ongoing recognition and mediate situations and activities that might otherwise discourage participation. The social media tools offered to cohorts are just that—tools that eliminate barriers of distance and time to enable communication between participants who already have an innate desire to reach out to each other for personal gain.

Why Cohort Learning Works

We have been able to identify a number of common elements that we think make cohort learning programs the killer app for social media success:

Accountability — Perhaps the primary factor in the success of the cohort learning framework is accountability. In a learning situation, cohorts are aware that peers and coaches are monitoring their activity. Participation in interpersonal interactions using social media (chat, discussion boards, blogging, media share) may even be designed into the curriculum as part of practice and feedback exercises and considered in assessing the success of the participant in the program. We have a greater chance of achieving that which we measure.

Intrinsic Motivation — Assuming that future job success is tied to success within the cohort learning program, stakes are high and learners already come to the table with a high motivation to succeed. Social media tools that help them achieve that success will be readily accepted and utilized.

Efficiency — A well crafted cohort framework provides “one-stop shopping” for learner needs throughout the life of the program. The framework provides context for the learning, and just-in-time tools handle secure program registration/authentication, communication (live and message driven), and assignments. Contrast this with managing email communication with a coach and document sharing vs. an option to go to a separate social portal. Making it easier for participants to complete course requirements helps them fit those requirements into their already busy work schedules.

Relationships — Facebook is successful in spite of its clunky and often maddening interface because of our strong desire to connect with a closed group of friends and family. Likewise, cohort groups build relationships based on shared interests, knowledge, and experiences. Many cohorts welcome technology that helps them learn from and share with each other within the context of the program.

Set Timeframe — Like a good story, cohort participation has a beginning, middle, and end. Participants start together and muster the energy to stay engaged for the duration of the program, knowing there will be a completion point.

Value is Key

As Harrison Withers pointed out in Communities of Practice: *Batteries Not Included:

It’s not enough to build [social] capability and hope that it will be used; you must make sure value is present on a continuing basis.

The value in visiting a social learning framework for a cohort group is naturally present in the mechanics of a cohort program.

If you are thinking of exploring social learning at your organization, look to piloting it in your cohort programs for greatest acceptance and immediate ROI. If you currently deliver a “bootcamp” for sales, leadership, or Onboarding, a distance-learning cohort model with a directed approach to social media will quickly reap positive rewards.

As always, we welcome your perspective. What has been your experience with social learning at your organization? Can you offer any social learning experiences to corroborate or refute our observations? We welcome your feedback!

The beautiful beach vistas of Laguna Niguel, CA.

Now that I have that out of my system, the theme of the conference was “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal.” And while there were definitely some sessions focused on the old normal—how do I leverage my LMS and measure how many butts in seats I pushed through last year—there were also some refreshing perspectives that really align with our commitment to integrated learning.

The conference kicked off with Steven M.R. Covey and his keynote based on The Speed of Trust. The Media 1 management staff has all been through this program, and it has taught us quite a bit about how we work with each other. Reviewing this material reminded me how trust is critical when we talk about justifying our efforts not only to our clients, but also as we carry the vision up to their senior leadership at their companies. In retrospect, this also speaks to another major theme of the conference: measurement. It occurs to me that there is sometimes a difference between justification and measurement, and I wonder what it says about our trust levels when we use measurement of volume as justification for effectiveness. I would propose that trust, when properly established, allows us to let go of soft numbers linked to volume of effort and places focus on the hard numbers that reflect moving our businesses forward.

Covey’s keynote was soon followed by a panel of thought leaders including my friends from the Internet Time Alliance—Jay Cross (@jaycross), Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator), and Jane Hart (@C4LTP). In this somewhat controversial segment, several issues where explored, including whether or not the ADDIE model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) was really still relevant in a day and age where user-generated content  and informal content has become more prominent. That prompted my thought, and subsequent tweet:

Does every problem we need to face need to be analyzed? Does every analysis have a solution that needs to be designed, and does every design need to be developed?

I would argue that the role of corporate training and learning professionals is transforming and evolving away from being ADDIE-driven content factories and is now aligning closer to being curators. This also lead to a discussion on whether or not the Kirkpatrick model was still valid for measuring training—see a pattern yet? It’s not that the Kirkpatrick model is inherently bad, just many of our interpretations fall short of being valuable. If we only make it through the first two levels—that is, whether or not people are happy and whether or not they remember—that may be enough to justify our efforts, but did it really help us evaluate whether or not we are having an impact on the business?

Another highlight was Bob Mosher (@bmosh) from LearningGuide Solutions on becoming an agile learning organization. The premise of Bob’s talk was his experience in guiding his clients toward learning that is more strategic and aligns with the strategy of the business. Bob believes informal learning and social learning opportunities offer performance support that is both effective and practical. Bob also echoed my sentiment that we need to look at the role of the corporate training department differently; that it’s not as much about creating content as is about creating usable context and integration.

By far, my favorite session was with Dan Pontefract (@dpontefract) from Telus talking about “The Rise of Collaboration in Learning, Leadership and 2.0 Technologies.” Dan is an open and frank speaker who pulls no punches in his evaluation of traditional learning functions in companies. Dan, perhaps more than any other learning professional I’ve talked to lately, has a clear vision for shifting learning from a series of disconnected events to an INTEGRATED, connected, continuous and collaborative process. He also has the technical infrastructure to prove it—built in SharePoint™ to boot! I left Dan’s session charged up that someone else gets our vision and came up with solutions that in many ways echo the types of solutions we are building for our clients. Check out Dan’s blog Trainingwreck; you’ll be glad you did.

All in all, of course we hear what we want to hear, and I heard people starting to talk about the sorts of things that my team and I are passionate about—and I am excited. I feel that I am energized and eager to help my clients carve out their own little piece of the transformation that we are in the middle of. Sure I heard a lot of the old normal too—like how we do we stop our employees from saying stuff we don’t agree with and new ways to spin all the old numbers. But there is enough evidence of the “new normal” taking hold to make me believe that we really can change the game.

Email is over! I only use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to communicate with clients.

In processing his perspective, my first reaction was that no way would this shift ever completely evolve. However, I resisted from making an immediate response and let the thought resonate to consider the concept and its potential benefits. Today, it certainly seems far less radical than it did at the time.

Have you ever experienced a situation regarding a new technology innovation/concept where the mere thought seemed unfathomable?

It can be overwhelming. Believe me, I know.

Having been in the technology industry for over two decades, I find myself regularly taking deep dives into new innovations, trends, and solutions. Over the years, I have learned the importance of keeping an open mind when considering a new concept and its impacts. However, those in Human Resources are not tasked with having to keep ahead of all of these technology waves and their impacts as part of their main responsibilities. HR folks are users of technology, not experts. So, it’s understandable that processing all of the technical innovations and new concepts can hit like a tidal wave when trying to discern the right system or process or technological advance to capitalize upon.  

The HR Technology Tidal Wave

I recently had a number of “tidal wave” moments—along with 4,000 other Human Resource Professionals—when I attended the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas in early October. I went there to review and evaluate some of the latest HR solution offerings, and as expected, there were several human capital vendors marketing their latest wares to the HR community in the main exhibition hall. But it was the breakout sessions that proved incredibly thought-provoking and often left the audiences (including me) pondering how to integrate the presented concepts, material, or solutions into their organizations.

Not surprisingly then, I found the most value came from the conversations between the attendees throughout the four-day event. These discussions focused either on their current organization’s status or how to process ideas presented at an earlier breakout session. Reoccurring topics throughout the conference centered on employee engagement and change management as well as how to choose and integrate the latest technology into a company’s HR Ecosystems.

Having been in the human resource/technology industry for many years, I can only sympathize with my fellow attendees in their attempts to tackle the monolithic task of selecting enterprise solutions that best fit their organizational goals. And to multiply the confusion, most attendees at the HR Technology Conference were surprised to learn—after reviewing the exhibit floor with every booth promising to solve all of their HR struggles—that they had many more choices than anticipated, which only compounds the assessment process for identifying the right software.

This task of assessing a solution alone takes a major investment of HR time to determine if it will fit the organization’s technical infrastructure and deliver everything the vendor says it will. In my experience, when you hear “we are currently developing an integration piece for that,” the likely translation is “no, our solution does not currently fit your technical infrastructure.” I seemed to hear a lot of that when I walked the exhibit floor. 

HR Tech Trends… Changing How We Work

Mobile & Multi-Tasking

There was also a lot of conference focus on cloud/mobile technology, and I noticed many attendees “multi-tasking” throughout the day on their smart phones, iPads, and laptops. Interestingly, I was surprised when the speaker at one of the breakout sessions asked who in the audience was “multi-tasking” and more than 75% of the room raised their hands. Having “grown up” with a career where meetings required turning off phones, laptops, and even farther back, beepers, this only underscored how much technology is constantly changing how we work. And as fast as new technology innovations are brought onto the market or as quickly as new versions of current software become available, we in HR have to possess a passion to stay informed in order to keep our organizations up to date and attract the best talent.

As part of today’s best practices in HR, we are responsible for establishing the company brand with talent we bring into our organizations. It is important that our initial impact with a new hire conveys high innovation and performance and that it is reinforced throughout an employee’s tenure. While topics of employees using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at work were sometimes a sensitive subject at the conference, the reality of course is that most of our current and future employees have already integrated these social media tools into their daily lives. And despite your own personal or privately-held position on social media sites and mobile technology in the workplace, they have arrived and are being adopted into our business lives every day. In establishing your brand, supporting key organizational initiatives, or educating your organization’s workforce about, you have to consider these waves of technology.

SharePoint™ as HR Tech

A favorite breakout session presented a Fortune 100 medical organization’s solution utilizing SharePoint™ as a technology layer to integrate their learning with their HR technology ecosystem. And in the process, they found SharePoint can present an effective and engaging experience for the users when implemented correctly. Instead of replacing current systems, their solution enhanced them. This cutting-edge approach is something we can’t ignore—no matter what your current position/experience with SharePoint. It continues to evolve as an enterprise platform, and it’s come a long way since the early cumbersome rollouts of out-of-the-box file sharing portals.

Social & Collaborative

Another common conference trend focused on the concept of “un-conference” collaboration between HR professionals through the use of social media (e.g. Twitter, blogs, etc.). When enough interest is generated around a topic, the individuals take it upon themselves to schedule a meeting/venue to continue the informational exchange face-to-face. Although this practice has been around for a while, it is now much easier for HR professionals to create a timely platform to address a single topic of specific interest outside of a large, annual conference. In a more intimate setting, all attendees have a voice to ask questions and get answers in the round table format.

If we’re doing that for ourselves in the HR industry, shouldn’t we also be thinking about doing that for our employees? Mapping interests to timely information and job-specific roles—including tapping into the power of social media—can keep employees engaged just as an “un-conference” collaboration can keep savvy HR professionals up to date.

Embracing the Tech Wave

The ultimate take-away from the 2011 HR Technology Conference is this:

New technology is something that HR professionals should not fear, but embrace—or at least consider integrating into existing systems.

For those of you who have difficulty accepting or integrating the technical evolution into your everyday lives, I suggest you connect with colleagues who do embrace it. When considering integrating technology into your HR Ecosystem, establish relationships with those whose career revolves specifically around HR technology. These are the folks who live for technology 24/7 and keep current with trends and solution performance/capabilities. Use these people to help guide you in making the right solution decisions that fit your organization—before purchasing technical solutions on your own.

Too often we get so entrenched in our own organization’s existing ecosystem that we do not always remember to come up for air and check what new waves of technology are crashing in around us. And unfortunately, intentions to review or evaluate technology end up pushed so far down our “To Do” list, the task is almost forgotten.

So, don’t let the perspective from a young entrepreneur about replacing email with Twitter hit you like a tidal wave and allow you to completely miss an opportunity to contribute to the impactful evolution of your organization and your workforce. Connect with other HR professionals that have successfully integrated solutions themselves. Or consider engaging someone in a consultative capacity who will objectively evaluate your organization’s infrastructure and help you confidently make the right decision.

Overall, despite getting hit with a few unexpected tidal waves of my own, I felt the conference was well worth the investment. I would encourage those who have debated attending in the past to definitely make plans to go to next year’s event. Perhaps, I will have the chance to engage you at an impromptu “un-conference” while there.

Thousands of books, articles and online resources constantly tell us the “best” way to do all that. The simple truth is that they all kind of say the same thing:

You have to address all the issues to get the performance and the results you want.

In our performance consultancy at Media 1, we have been working on ways to fully, integrate learning and performance improvement into the entire talent management ecosystem. We believe that effective change management needs to happen as a continuous process, not as a series of disconnected events strung together out of context.

Basically, you need ongoing learning and performance initiatives that are supported in a variety of ways in the workplace to allow engaged and committed employees to get the results needed for business success. Leaders tend to support things like that because they see the value.

What does this mean for you? It means that if you want to transform yourself into a true performance artist, you have to decide to get beyond the latest business improvement fads and go back to a simple construct that’s been around for decades. Getting better business results—whether for our clients, for our employees, or for ourselves as individuals—means tapping into the well-researched and well-established performance factors of the Performance Improvement Factors Grid. (T. Gilbert).

The Performance Improvement Factors Grid (or just Performance Grid) highlights a systemic view of performance improvement and has long been a cornerstone of the performance consultant’s knowledge base and methodology. It is a proven model that can be applied to a whole organization, to an organizational process, or at an individual job performer level.

And yet, it’s pretty simple. In fact, it could even be drawn on a napkin. (Just make sure it’s not a linen napkin—restaurants don’t like that.)

For the best performance improvement results, try using this:

The Performance Grid shows the factors affecting performance improvement and how they're connected.

At first glance, it may be hard to parse out what this chart is trying to show you. Take a closer look, and you’ll see that the Performance Grid demonstrates what common sense tells us. Optimal performance and employee engagement happens when organizations have all the right supporting pieces in the right places. There are many factors to consider, but this model simply segments them into six major categories. Each of them is connected in some way to either encourage or inhibit positive change.

The work environment (i.e. the organization) needs to provide clear expectations and timely feedback as well as the right tools, systems, processes, and resources. And the organization has to assure that the right mix of incentives and consequences exists to encourage employees to take the right actions that get the right results…at the right times.

But successful performance improvement does not lie solely with the workplace or rest exclusively on the shoulders of leadership to provide the information, expectations, systems, and incentives. Employees need to bring certain necessary skills, capabilities, and motives to the table as well.

Arguably, most concepts of human performance can be wrapped up in this model. In fact, many professionals have made entire careers out of each of these individual performance factor areas. Clearly the major component areas of traditional HR and talent management have great interplay here—everything from Selection and Recruitment to Career Management and Performance Appraisal to Organizational Development.

The most obvious of these areas can be Learning and Development, but sometimes it’s overemphasized. Traditional training focuses almost exclusively on knowledge and skill acquisition. Training is fine—and is often part of a successful performance solution when it’s done well—but performance improvement comes from the right balance of solutions that address all of the performance factors. Training alone isn’t usually enough.

So what does that “right” balance for a performance improvement solution look like?

We’ve already established that the six performance improvement factors outlined in the Performance Grid tell us the employee bears some of the responsibility for performance and the organization bears the rest. But surprisingly, it’s not always a 50-50 split between the organizational side and the employee side. On average about 70-80% of typical performance-related issues relate to the organizational side of things. And 20-30% is usually in the realm of an employee to control.

This means that, as an employee, you not only need to have the right skills and attitudes to do the job, but you also need to be supported by a good workplace atmosphere—one that provides the right environment, tools, and incentives for you to do your job well. As discussed in my last article, that’s where the role of great leader buy-in starts to have a real impact.

For employers and talent managers who want stellar results, this means finding the right people first and then supporting them with the best tools and support mechanisms second. The Performance Grid reminds us that this is more than just a good idea; it’s crucial.

It means designing multi-part strategies that address all six areas influencing performance in the real world—and especially those at the organizational level—that may be holding back desired outcomes.

With new technologies, we have the ability to figure out what really drives performance and design and implement larger, over-arching and ever-more effective organizational solutions that help improve performance and increase business results. A new set of skills and tools (such as social media and SharePoint™) are emerging that add necessary functionality and workflow to learning opportunities both in the traditional sense of corporate learning and in the more integrated day-to-day activities of employees.

We have to adapt to the changing needs of today’s corporate learners. As organizations, we need to provide the performance support they need to create the positive results that business leaders need.

Most training and development professionals are at least generally aware of this by now, but it’s time to broaden our thinking and find creative ways to address performance factors more effectively in the corporate environment. One idea is to take a closer look at collaborative and integrated learning models that scaffold onto existing learning systems, portals, or document repositories while enhancing them with a layer of technology—such as SharePoint™.

The time to find new performance support solutions is now because we don’t have time or money to waste.

Certainly business leaders know that.

Think about it. What have you done to push the boundaries of performance lately?

Next time I write, I’ll talk a bit more about those boundaries in more detail—what effects performance improvement, why it matters and what you can do about it. In the meantime, though, consider taking a look at the first draft of The Integrated Learning Manifesto that we recently developed here at Media 1. It is the culmination of two years of intensive work in designing and piloting a new direction for corporate learning and performance improvement.

Think about the last time you engaged in a learning activity at your workplace. Did the course give you what you needed at the right time? Did it clearly relate to your career, building on your existing skills, and moving you closer to completing a business requirement or meeting a personal career goal? Or did it feel more like something you simply had to do in order to check off a box on a list of requirements? Register. Complete. Move on.

Enter Integrated Learning

We at Media 1 believe effective learning needs to happen as a process, not a series of disconnected events strung together out of context. The time has come for a new, integrated model for corporate learning. Technology should provide a platform for seamlessly delivering carefully selected, timely, role-appropriate learning opportunities at the right point in career development. Learner needs must drive the LMS, not the other way around.

With that, we at Media 1 declare this first iteration of The Integrated Learning Manifesto. 

I want to learn. I want to succeed. Help me by providing learning opportunities that are:

1.      Social

At home, I use social media sites to keep up to date with the latest in news and technology that affect my career. I post questions and get feedback and answers from my friends. I have much to learn from my managers and peers at work. It should be just as easy to reach out to them as it is to seek advice from my social network. Give me social media tools behind our firewall I can use to exchange job-related information with my coworkers.

2.      Relevant

I need to know how each learning opportunity applies directly to me and my role in the organization. If I don’t understand the purpose of a course or see what’s in it for me, don’t expect me to naturally engage with the material or automatically transfer what I learned on the job. Make it easier; help me put everything in context.

3.      Self-directed

Recognize that I am engaged in multiple tracks of learning simultaneously. I have to meet a number of annual HR compliance requirements and keep up with general business initiatives and personal development courses. I am taking technical courses to master the ever-changing systems and tools I need to do my job, as well as courses specific to my role in the organization. To advance my career, I am enrolled in a management program. I want visibility and control over options within each of these various learning tracks, and I want to chart my progress through each curriculum.

4.      Integrated

The LMS is no longer the center of my learning universe. I am also learning through social media hubs and information portals. I make regular visits to various corporate sites and systems of which the LMS is just one. Please tie everything together for me and give me a simple, integrated path across the corporate ecosystem.

5.      Focused

Like you, I’m busy. When I make time for learning, my other responsibilities don’t go away. In the vast and ever-deepening sea of content and learning options, please don’t make me wade through an unwieldy content store or course catalog. Make it all available, but provide good filters to direct me to exactly the right learning from which we both will get the most immediate benefit.

6.      Timely

Make sure that I have access to up-to-date, just-in-time learning and support for the things that matter today. Don’t try to cram a year’s worth of learning into a one-week “boot camp.” Six months from now, you’d much rather I look up and work to the most current process anyway. 

Start Today

The goal of this Manifesto is to shatter old corporate learning paradigms and spark thoughts and conversations in new directions. Meeting some of these goals requires simple changes in the way we manage our current corporate learning environment—finding new ways to direct learners through our existing curricula and across systems. These short-term goals can be accomplished in the weeks and months ahead. Others require changes in policy or implementing new technologies; establish those as long-term goals, and start planning and working toward them one step at a time. There’s no reason not to start today.

It’s easy enough to operate from the perspective that there is certain information that employees “need” to do their job, and there is certain information that is “nice to have.” In corporate structures, critical information or the “need to have” information is often presented in the most expedient way possible. Very often expediency in design results in the employee having to jump through hoops to get the information. “It’s the best we could do, in the time we had.”

While we may have accomplished our basic goals for a site, it doesn’t mean we did a good job. In fact, if we aren’t careful, we may actually create new issues in the process. If we didn’t gain acceptance of the platform we used for the initiative, chances are we’ve:

·         Poisoned the platform for future use by leaving a negative first impression.

·         Used too much time ($) to achieve too little tangible results.

·         Sent a message that we don’t value our users.

While it is sometimes necessary to compromise good design for expediency, we pay a heavy price for failing to gain acceptance. When we do gain acceptance, we achieve our goals faster, cheaper, and we create repeat visits that give us a viable way to expand our goals and create something sustainable over time. AND, we send a message that we care enough to think things through and value our team.

So why, when it comes to SharePoint sites, is it so hard to design for acceptance?

When building informational or community sites, SharePoint acts as a content management system, or CMS, and allows us to present the data separately and in different contexts. This means the data or information is contained in a different technical structure than the look and feel, or branding of the site. This is wonderful when it comes to keeping the content up-to-date, but requires a little extra planning when designing page layouts that support content that is meant to be changed independent of the layout. That seems to be where many implementations fall short.

I.T. departments are typically charged with implementing systems, such as SharePoint, and while your mileage may vary, they generally do a very good job of implementing the functionality or data layer… and tend to pay very little attention to the presentation layer. The typical result is a perfectly functional data infrastructure with a bone-stock, straight from the vanilla Microsoft set of page templates. Since SharePoint wasn’t designed to fulfill a specific need from a specific audience, not much care was taken with these stock templates. Frankly, I find them ugly and filled with usability issues, and I am not alone. Nonetheless, as SharePoint is rolled out, content owners are very often forced to use these templates either expressly or because they aren’t informed that they have any control over the presentation and don’t have the knowledge of how to change it.

In many organizations, a user’s first exposure to SharePoint is an ugly, usability-challenged site, a “crew pie” to reference my previous post. They may need the information that the site contains, but they are often left frustrated and unimpressed. For organizations that recognize this failing, this typically results in a subsequent project to improve either:

·         Look and feel (branding)

·         Usability

The truth is you need to do both. If you fix the content organization and improve the usability, it’s hard for the user to get past the ugly and truly engage with the site. If you fix the ugly but leave the usability out, you may get your users back briefly, but they will inevitably get frustrated again. User acceptance of a site means they accept both the way a site looks AND the way it works.

Usability is a topic for another article, but for organizations that have already fallen into the bad- or no-design trap, a good design can help them crawl out of the user acceptance hole. It sends a message that this site is worthwhile and important enough to warrant thoughtful design, and likewise the users of the site are important and valued enough to warrant the time and money spent on design. For those organizations that haven’t rolled out their first sites, let this serve as a tip:

Whether you call it branding, look and feel, or design, it’s a critical piece of user acceptance.

In the next entry, we’ll focus on usability some more, starting with setting realistic objectives and how to map those objectives to the functionality you design into your sites.

There are thousands of books, methods and “sure fire” approaches being touted as the answer. With the exception of a few standouts, few of them make any real difference. At Media 1, we’ve taken the position that true improvement happens when a few relatively simple concepts are followed, and it doesn’t matter exactly what you call them.

But a couple of things are for sure:

1. Simpler is better.
2. Great leaders help lead great improvement.

That’s why our performance consulting practice is based on a few basic principles and uses a limited number of tools—tools that can be easily scaled and adapted to client needs to help them accomplish exactly what they need.

One of the big principles is that great leadership is the key to organizational performance improvement. Why? In our experience, three practical reasons are at play.

First: Without leader support improvements often do not accomplish intended results.

Second: In the absence of ongoing leader support, performance improvement interventions can often fail or lose their effectiveness over time.

Lastly: No matter how you look at it, improving business performance contains equal parts of people, process, and technology—none of which are successfully done in a vacuum.

Support from “The Top” is critical to the success of any business endeavor. This is especially true when making changes, even if they’re meant for the better. No matter how good or “cool” your interventions may be, they are not going anywhere unless leadership embraces them, touts them, funds them, and monitors them.

The Chicken or the Egg

The real question:

Do you get great leader support because you provide great solutions that increase business productivity and success?

OR

Do you provide great solutions because you have great leadership support?

The answer: Yes.

Don’t think about it too hard or let it devolve into a chicken-and-egg debate. The basic answer is that both are required. Great solutions get great leaders to support them. Great leaders inspire and support great solutions.

And great performance consultants know this. According to a recent CorpU article discussing results from the 10^th Annual Learning Excellence and Innovation Benchmark Study (also by CorpU):

“…expert companies that use a consistent performance consulting methodology enjoy more leadership support for organizational learning than those that do not… {and} a possible reason – performance consulting provides a structured way to ensure the right people are being asked the right questions regularly, thus increasing leaders’ support and alignment of learning with the business.”

Companies that have great support from leaders are able to successfully increase their performance because they have a culture that allows it to happen. That means these companies have a culture in which leaders are open to taking regular and frequent looks at current practices in a hard and honest way to see where continuous improvement can happen.

These cultures are usually characterized by:

• Clear leader-driven strategic and tactical directions and expectations that are clearly tied to business metrics along with great communication about how efforts are going and where improvements can happen.
• The right tools, processes, and resources in place that allow change and improvements to happen
• The right measures and incentives that support improvement and don’t clash internally—rewards or consequences that support the right things and don’t inadvertently work against desired outcomes
• People with the right skills, knowledge, and attitudes to foster improvements and usher them from concept to reality—including ways to address emotional and knowledge issues that normally arise during any change initiative
• People with the right capabilities to do what they are supposed to do at the time they’re supposed to do it
• People with motives that are in sync with what the company needs to accomplish

Great performance comes about because the environment supports it and the right people have the skills to pull it off. Good leaders support good solutions that help them improve their productivity. They don’t really care if the solutions are learning solutions or business process solutions … as long as they work.

Once you know that leader support is one of the major keys to success, you can focus on ways to get that support. And you’ll see that with it, things work out. Without it … well, they won’t.

Getting Leader Support

So what does that mean for you? It means you need a quick, proven way to figure out what needs improving and what can be done to improve them in business terms that leaders respond to!

Business leaders tend to respond well to things that help them achieve their business objectives. So it’s your job to help their organization build and support solutions that do just that.

Solutions generally come in sets to address people, process, and technology issues. Keep in mind, it’s all based on a “performance viewpoint”—something we’ll discuss in my next blog entry.

Basically, you need a way to assure that people, process, and technology are addressed to help ensure successful improvement. And you can accomplish that by talking about the performance consultant’s secret weapon—the Performance Improvement Factors Grid.

In the meantime, you’re already on the right track. You know it all starts with great leadership. Get that and you’ve got one of the most important keys to successful corporate performance improvement.

I caught one of my favorite news shows the other day, and surprisingly, I lost interest within a few minutes and turned off the television. Historically, this show was one I watched consistently so having the urge to turn it off made me scratch my head. The lead anchor had left the show a while back and the replacement was another member of their news team who had been promoted to the vacant position. The replacement had always been someone I did not favor, mainly because they were not very believable in their delivery—like a bad actor attempting to over compensate using emotion. Having invested in this particular news show for years, I thought that maybe I just needed to get used to this change and that I would eventually get back to perceiving it as a trusted and otherwise engaging source for world news.

Well, unfortunately, the over-acting anchor is still delivering world news, and I have moved on.

As I analyzed my negative response to the change and my decision to turn off the broadcast, it dawned on me that delivery matters. How we obtain information is so crucial to the success of a world news show—or for any medium targeted at informing or educating an audience. In this day and age, people can choose from multiple mediums to receive information, news, and communications. The audience can leave if they don’t like what they are getting. This forces the source providing informative content to carefully consider their delivery, ensuring that they keep their audience engaged to accomplish the organizational goals—and for their own survival.

Content providers must keep current with evolving methods of delivery to maintain and engage their audience. So if you have an unappealing or outdated delivery model, your audience may “tune out” or worse, you could lose them entirely. Does your audience believe and respect your message in a way they are compelled to act upon it, or are you simply paying for the equivalent of over-acting?

Now apply this perspective to human capital improvement within your own HR ecosystem, and consider the message you are delivering in your own Onboarding, leadership development, and corporate learning programs. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your content delivery current for today’s workforce and your environment?
• Will your employees remain engaged through the entire experience?
• Will they absorb the information you are communicating as well as retain the content throughout their tenure with your organization?

 Information delivered in a rote, disengaged manner or by a disingenuous “newscaster” can be tuned out as quickly as I turned the channel on my former favorite news program. Effective human capital improvement is not just presenting job expectations and/or meeting the requirements in an HRIS or Talent Management System checklist. Beyond procedural and informational knowledge, it involves building your company’s brand and culture, establishing standards for your employees to carry through their tenure with your organization, and giving them a reason to act in support of your company’s vision long after finishing each corporate learning experience. And social media and networking tools are being integrated to further engage employees with mapping/monitoring their own career development and performance management.

Fortunately, there are ways of keeping your company information delivery engaging and current without spending millions replacing your LMS or HRIS, or by having to hire a really good actor. Utilizing a technology layer that resides on top of your current human capital improvement systems and information repositories, you can offer individualized dashboards for each employee. Your current systems and processes remain in place, but the dashboard informs and directs employees with the right information at the right time, so they have what they need to succeed. It’s like having my trusted news anchor presenting what I want to see in a format that is current and interesting to me.

So before your employees turn you off because your content delivery method is outdated, I encourage you to consider using a dashboard solution as your “Lead Anchor”—and leave the bad acting behind.

Well, on one store trip, I noticed a sign on the wall that said “no crew pies.” My first reaction was that the store operator was sending a message about mistakes, and not making them, but the company had all sorts of slogans and signs about making quality product and “no crew pies” was not one of them, so I had to ask.

Turns out the operator had much different reasons, and it wasn’t a slogan; it was a rule. He explained to me that he was in a war for good employees with the other restaurants in town. It was hard to find and keep people, and he felt that it sent the wrong message to serve the people that worked for him the worst product his store turned out. Besides, if his team thought that bad pizza was good enough for them, how far of a stretch is it for them to expect his customers to live with bad pizza?

Fast forward to today. I am in the privileged position of consulting with some of the world’s largest companies. Companies that are selling customers some of the most advanced systems, services, and technology available. However, all too often the internal sites these companies use to support their own employees are the internet equivalent of “crew pies.” Barely branded and poorly organized. This is especially true when it comes to SharePoint™ sites.

It’s not enough to just have the information out there. The person has to first want to use the site (acceptance) and then be able to use the site (usability). Newsflash: The default SharePoint™ page templates are not attractive and are not intuitively usable. Even if you are lucky enough to have an IT department that branded the default templates, it most likely is still not good enough. Chances are if you already have an existing SharePoint™ implementation, you’ve seen these default templates in action, as have your users. They have already formed a negative impression of what SharePoint™ is and have little or no vision of what its potential is.

I’m not suggesting that all of your internal sites become graphical Flash sites with splash pages, but I am saying that at a cursory glance, your internal sites need to:

1. Not look like SharePoint™ default templates
2. Reflect the importance of the people, business line, product or service it is intended to support

In SharePoint™ development circles, efforts towards user acceptance are often referred to as branding, but it’s more than that; it’s part of the overall design. The goal of design should be a positive or at least transparent user experience. There are two components of user experience, acceptance and usability. Acceptance is typically the result of good positioning and good visual design whereas usability stems from information design.

If we go back to our “crew pie” example, mistake pizzas may in fact taste good, but the user experience is disrupted because admittedly user acceptance is compromised: the pizza is ugly or its usability is challenged—it has the wrong stuff. That’s not to say the crew won’t eat it, but they may not like it.

The intangible message here is that our internal sites and systems set the tone for what our employees deliver to our customers or users, and it’s imperative that our customer’s user experience be flawless. Besides, in a war for talent, our valued employees deserve better than a “crew pie.”

In my next blog post, we’ll dive more into the user acceptance side of the equation and explore some strategies for designing and validating user acceptance as part of a branding, positioning, or graphic design effort.

By donning the content curator hat on top of a strong foundation in instructional design and performance consulting, we open doors to a new incarnation of interactive online learning. We begin to break through the traditional boundaries previously imposed on learning content. Content curation requires that we move away from delivering corporate learning as a loose collection of independent eLearning courses. It requires new learning strategies and technologies. But if cramming a corporate LMS full of new courses isn’t the path to the future of learning, where do we start?

You’re Probably Already Curating Content
If you actively use social media, you have likely already participated in content curation. Any time you share a link to content that you have not created, you are a content curator. You are providing a filter, directing your readers to a specific target in a sea of information clutter. You are also providing context—that is, the understanding of why the link may be meaningful to your audience at that particular point in time, especially if you add a few words of explanation. Curation makes information mining much more efficient than unguided search and allows readers to focus on digesting the provided content under the assumption that it has already been vetted as worth their time and attention. This is no more or less true if you are sending a link to an article by an industry guru or a fresh service bulletin to your internal business team… or forwarding that video of a cute Jack Russell Terrier to your fellow dog-loving Facebook friends.

If you have ever developed learning content, you are wired for content curation. Consider the types of links you have shared in the past. You may recognize that curation skills are similar to those we have used for years in supporting traditional classroom or online learning content:

• Notating a research paper
• Creating a recommended reading list
• Requiring a course reading assignment
• Establishing a resource “share drive” on the corporate intranet

These activities all exercise similar content curation muscles:

1. Filter down to just the right content
2. Provide appropriate context
3. Share a link to the content

Content Curation in Corporate Learning
Now you’re ready to put content curation into practice at your workplace. Where do you start? Here are a few content curation strategies we’ve implemented at Media 1 to give you inspiration.

Resource Page
A simple solution that can offer high value: offer a curated Resource Page containing links to additional reading at the end of your next eLearning course, along with a few descriptive lines to provide context. If you are concerned about maintaining links within a course, provide a single link to a resource page on your intranet for easier updates. Be sure to consider internal or external blogs or podcasts that you know consistently provide helpful content, and while you have their attention, don’t forget printable job aids or worksheets.

Course as a Portal
Blackboard or Moodle users, consider setting up a “course” that is actually a reference portal to organized, curated resource links for a department or job function. In essence, use the framework as a content management system for your curated content.

Smart Portal
To avoid unruly “data dump” portals, enlist SharePoint™ logic and workflows to help further filter large amounts of curated content by subject or relevance. For example:

• Guide new hires to instructions and resources for completing common tasks in the first weeks on the job
• Drive learners to a group of courses in your LMS that are most relevant based on their role, region, or self-selections from a drop-down menu
• Provide salespeople with the ability to sort and filter podcasts by managers on targeted selling or product announcements
• Assign curator(s) to periodically seek out new content links from within your organization and register them in the appropriate portal(s)

Moderated Learning Community
Develop a moderated Community of Practice, enlisting dedicated Mentors or Guides to curate content in their area of expertise. Consider the model of the moderated learning community Mahlo.com:

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

As a bonus, offer moderated discussion boards to encourage learners to share ideas around curated content. Or, scale back and set up a series of moderated wikis for a simplified approach.

Curated Blogging
Educate your blogging managers and SMEs on the art and value of high quality content curation around a theme that is meaningful to them and valuable to the continuous growth of your learners. Targeted curation eases the burden of always having to work through completely new ideas and allows busy writers to scaffold on the foundational ideas set forth by others. At the same time, it builds organizational knowledge by personally directing learners to relevant content that is already available but may otherwise be overlooked.

Closing Thoughts
Throughout each of these strategies, the running theme is to enlist yourself and other knowledgeable and passionate Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to filter and provide context to the resource materials that they value the most—trusting that your knowledge will also provide value to others interested in the same subject. Over time, through competent content curation, the communities and portals we develop and support will become sought out as trusted sources of sustainable learning and performance in their own right—despite the learning content not being delivered as a formal course.