Podcast 25 is the third of a series of three tutorials exploring social media platforms for formal and informal learning in organisations.

Why not download this free e-learning training resource from iTunes.

Or read the transcript.

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our YouTube Channel (Podcast 25 is imbedded below).

Podcast 24 is the second of a series of three tutorials exploring social media platforms for formal and informal social learning in organisations.

Why not download this free e-learning training resource from iTunes

Or read the transcript

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our YouTube channel (Podcast 24 is embedded below)

Podcast 23 is the first of a series of three tutorials exploring social media platforms for formal and informal social learning in organisations. This podcast covers things to think about when choosing a social media platform.

Why not download this free e-learning training resource from iTunes

Or read the transcript

Or watch the entire free e-learning tutorial series on our YouTube Channel (podcast 23 is embedded below)

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.