Question from a client:

We have a new Learning Management System (LMS). How can it help us to induct new people into the organisation?

Okay. We need to think about what both the organisation and the new employee wants to achieve. A colleague of mine once said to me, in the first three weeks a new employee wants to:

1. satisfy themselves that their decision to join the organisation was the right one
2. prove to the organisation that their decision to engage the new employee was the right one

The organisation typically wants the new employee to become productive as soon as possible. And they want to mitigated risk by ensuring the new employee is conversant with important policies and guidelines.

E-Learning to mitigate risk

It’s important to think about learner ‘state’ (see points 1 & 2 above) when designing the key messages in compliance courseware. It’s important to couch the content and assessment appropriately, to reflect the people aspects of the culture. The LMS plays a role in tracking course completion from a reporting perspective.

E-Learning to enable productivity

Before we begin on this topic, it’s useful to think about ways of chunking induction-related training:

1. Induction from a) organisation, b) department, and c) role perspectives. A new employee should be inducted into policies, procedures, tasks and people from each of these three business perspectives (a, b, c). It’s useful to take a co-ordinated approach to designing Induction, so that all 3 perspectives are presented and trained in synergy.
2. Collison & Parcel’s two famous knowledge management questions to the stimulus question of “I have a need”
• a) What do others know about it? How do I find them? (think social networks) and
• b) What information is available? How do I find it? (think information management and performance support)

Effective social networks (live or online) help staff to satisfy their productivity needs. An effective social network is one that is responsive, well used, and has norms in place in relation to sharing and collaboration, so that people know what’s expected of them. The role of L&D is to show new employees how to engage in social networks to get what they need and to contribute.

Performance support tools are aids that have been specifically designed and mediated through technology for the purpose of supporting performance at the point-of-need. The role of L&D is to be an informal guide to help new employees learn to diagnose their needs and then use the performance support tools properly to satisfy the need.

At this time, most LMS play a weak role in enabling productivity. We need to look at more agile and heuristuc systems; systems that provide information and people at the point of need. Think mobile apps for in-the-field needs, group decision support systems, social intranets and other and social platforms such as Jive.

The bottom line

• Induction should be a holistic and co-ordinated effort of both centralised and decentralised parts of the business – organisation, department, role.
• We need to be mindful of how we portray the organisation in compliance e-learning courses – the focus should be on ensuring employees know how to behave to keep them safe and happy and what to do if they don’t feel safe/happy. The focus should not appear to be an exercise to satisfy the organisation’s legal requirements.
• To enable employees to be productive as soon as possible, we need to evaluate the social aspects of the business as well as the support tools available to staff. Active organisational ‘knowledge’ can only be found in the minds of the individual and the collective, so let’s use technology to better enable our employees to solve problems.
• The role of L&D stretches beyond instructional design to that of a learning architect – who can see and understand how systems, processes and people inter-relate and how these work together to drive efficient productivity, and even innovation.

I noticed the 2011 National Learning and Development Index report was cited in BRW last week (Training decisions made on the run, June 23-29, pp51). The point being made was that training decisions appeared to be largely based on reactive responses to performance reviews rather than a conscious building of strategic capabilities linked to long-term business growth (reference Jeanne Marshall, National AITD president).

Jeanne’s comment resonated with my earlier blog post E-Learning Apporaches for Small Organisations, where the concepts of Enablement, Agile Content and Employees as Producers were explored. Social media enables peer-to-peer sharing, networking and collaboration like never before. RSS feeds, aggregated content, mobile devices that store and prioritise content for just-in-time support are all examples of how technologies can build employee capability. Webinars (aka virtual classrooms, web conferencing) can enable learning practitioners to connect with geographically dispersed teams and facilitate expert opinion sharing, problem-solving and innovative thinking.

So, why aren’t many organisations investigating these technologies to identify how they can support specific strategic capability development? I’m not entirely sure, but here are a few of my observations.

1. Many organisations have good IT departments that have purchased or at least understand the power of these technologies. Yet a strategic exploration of the tools for learning and performance improvement has not been completed between IT and Learning and Development (L&D). Examples of technologies I have seen available in organisations but not explored for learning purposes are webinar, RSS news aggregators and enterprise wikis.
2. Many IT departments are inhibited by corporate risk concerns which may have been valid several years ago, but may be less valid now when weighted against business benefits and considered against new risk management tools (e.g. Yackstar has a bank of prohibited words that detects when an inappropriate word has been written and then quarantines the comment)
3. L&D departments are stretched, and it’s difficult to find time to inform ourselves of these technologies; play with them and get an understanding of how they can be used to enhance capability
4. When stretched to deliver a result, many L&D practitioners default to what they know best - transactional training where content is pushed out, learners are immediately assessed, and the training box is ticked. This model of training and instruction is becoming less appropriate for knowledge workers who need to think critically and problem-solve
5. Some L&D organisations still consider e-learning or learning technologies to be simply self-directed courses. This is the strategy, and where much of the budget is spent. With so many new technologies available to us, time needs to be given to redefine the e-learning strategy
6. HR often identify compliance as a major risk, and the squeaky wheel gets the most oil – budget is directed to informing staff of policy at the detriment to developing smart blended learning solutions for capability development
7. A risk is identified that staff are not ready for web 2.0 and social media for learning and performance, and so this kind of innovation is put on hold. To an extent this is often true, and change management is an important component to implementing social media, RSS aggregators etc for peer-to-peer informal learning. Sooner or later new skills for ‘learning how to learn in my organisation‘ need to be developed. Recognition and reward for contribution is another important requirement to motivate change.

My deep concern is that the divide is widening between learning design of ‘yester-year’, the requirements of a ever-changing business landscape, and the opportunities that web 2.0 technologies enable staff development. Our practice is changing. We must begin to plan, strategise, touch and play with the tools that our staff are using at home anyway.

A number of smaller organisations (400-1800 employees or so) talk to me about beginning an e-learning strategy for their employees, and I’m excited for them. Three aspects to technology for learning are what enables e-learning to be viable for smaller organisations today.

1. Enablement.
This is about prioritising e-learning effort towards enabling employees to do what they need to do to be successful in their role. Sure, compliance training is important for small organisations. But I challenge the effort of creating large e-learns and implementing a LMS to track completion and pass/fail for some small organisation. Of course, compliance may be the business driver that funds the learning technology initiative in the first place. My point is to simply be mindful of the effort versus return. Perhaps continuing with face to face compliance training and sign-off sheets is the more viable option. Or, to perhaps make more robust the capturing of completion, initiate trackable online quizzes, and keep the content in well written paper-based policies and face to face deliveries.

2. Agile content.
It’s a truism that much of the useful information that people use to upskill or solve problems in the workplace becomes redundant within 12-18 months. And, if you spend days or weeks developing a learning solution for a small number of employees, then an 18 month self-life may not be worth the effort. Remember, for every additional day building a ‘sexy’ e-learn is a day away from other L&D work. Often, some simple instructional design principles used well is all that’s required to build an effective 15 minute e-learn in 2-3 days.

What is agile content?
For the L&D practitioner, agile content is that which is simple to design, produce, distribute and update. It is free from the LMS, residing in platforms that are easy to search and no more than 1 click from workflow.
For the employee, agile content is succinct, easy to digest and can be embedded in a place that suits the individual, such as browser favourites, via RSS or through bookmarking functionality.

3. Employee as producers.
Many employees are producers at home. They work with online photos, produce family and so forth. Additionally, many employees have long been producers of expert content, at presentations and in leadership and coaching situations. The technology that enables employees to be producers is relatively inexpensive. Consider Camtasia or the stand-along learn/share platform Bloomfire.

To be successful, many of these employees simply need a bit of tuition about how to create a piece of learning from instructional, visual, project management and authoring tool perspectives. If you can be clear on purpose, topic and quality, then employees may well be able to self-regulate, produce and share their expertise in a technology medium. As L&D, our role is to support them and maybe do a bit of editing to help their success.

So, before embarking on an e-learning technology strategy, consider these three technology aspects and how valuable they may be for your overall learning strategy purpose and outcome.

The intranet plays a valuable role in enabling employees and managers do what they need to do. In e-learning design, it’s important to link to the intranet for further information, as it is the intranet (or other enterprise platform, such as a wiki) that is available to employees long after the course has been closed. However, in my experience, the intranet often let’s the business down. Issues include:

• Lack of governance around information hierarchy and taxonomy
• Complex language, making it difficult for eyes to scan and assimilate the information
• Small type, little whitespace, and too few graphics and videos, again making it hard for eyes to scan
• Search engine that is unable to interpret your search phrase (think Google)
• Pages move, breaking hyperlinks that are embedded in documents and e-learning courses
• Intranet servers in global head office, making the intranet slow for local affiliates

The rigidity of many of the templates of older enterprise intranet platforms make it difficult for page owners to arrange content and add multimedia such as videos in ways that will be meaningful to their audience.

As learning and development people, we need to be aware of the role the intranet plays in employee enablement. We need to become involved in enterprise content management. How do we do this?

We need to develop a relationship with IT/web services; help them understand the role they play in enabling employees to be self-directed learners and problem-solvers. Usually the heads of IT know this, but sometimes the team members, caught in problem-solving technical issues, are less aware. Being on the front line, IT Helpdesk are often notified of issues of intranet search and retrieval. They can play a proactive role in providing advice to page owners.

Part of sustaining the intranet is planning for new intranet platforms, and the integration of the intranet with learning, knowledge management, information management and social media strategies.

One last point. The intranet is often the first place people go for information on programs, such as Induction or technical training. There are many parts to learning that fall outside of what e-learning and classroom courses provide. e.g. the just in time “How do I?” performance support, or ongoing collaboration and networking. So, when designing program blends, also consider what role the intranet will play in sustaining learning, and notifying people of what learning and support is available to them.