What if we ran weeLearning inside a company

After reading this post by Clark Quinn today something clicked.

In my day job I’ve been working hard on an alternative approach to workplace learning. We call it Love Learning. The aim is to promote and support independent learning throughout the company, instead of just sending people on courses. The first month or so was a great success, but it’s probably fair to say we hit a plateau in February. Don’t get me wrong, number-wise things are great, we’ve continued to get lots more hits on our intranet and Scoop.it posts. But that’s barely scratching the surface of what we really want to do – change the culture and perception of learning at work.

To move forwards we need to connect people, provide support where it’s needed and give them confidence that they can do it for themselves. This probably sounds a lot like the scaffolding Jane Hart has been talking so much about lately and it probably is. But I’m not sure I really like the analogy, probably because I don’t want to be a scaffolder. When I think of scaffolders I think of T-shirt tans and tattoos, parking in the middle of the road, shouting down the street etc.

But I digress.

I prefer to think of what we are doing as creating launch pads. I want to ignite fires, point people in the right direction, then thrust them into orbit.

How are we doing this?

We’ve taken an iterative, agile approach to this, otherwise we’d still be talking about it and planning it. Immersing myself in the world of design thinking has had a profound effect on the way I think and work in a very short space of time. I started work on our SharePoint community site last week. I’ve been putting it off for ages because it was frankly a daunting task. The template is “sucky” at best and I’ve never used Sharepoint before. But by taking some ideas from design thinking, agile and UX I’ve got a minimum viable product that I’m happy for people to try out, in less than a week.

So now we can stop cluttering the intranet with all our posts, which was always a workaround for what we wanted to do, and we can grow our online learning hub. But we’re also pursuing Chatter. Just as Twitter offers a different style of communication to Google plus or blogging, Chatter offers something different to SharePoint. I don’t know exactly how that’s going to work, but it feels like the right thing to do, so we’re doing it. Evidence based, it ain’t.

One to One Support

So far we’ve been meeting one to one with anyone who completes a fairly simple learning needs analysis questionnaire and basically coaching them to come up with ways they can develop themselves without going on courses. This is working pretty well, but we are missing the next step. When people leave that meeting with ideas to try out, we don’t have an easy way for them to share how it’s going, what they’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t. That’s where the SharePoint and Chatter sites will come in, but a lot of people are uncomfortable about sharing what can be quite personal stories online at work. It won’t be easy to get this stage of Love Learning going, but it’s fundamental to the direction we’ve taken.

And now at last we come back to the title of this post. Reading Clark’s post this morning I suddenly realised that we could run live informal learning events across the company. Not lunch and learns those are rarely anything but formal. Not webinars, most people get distracted too easily or just find them boring.

What we need is something more like weeLearning.

Something that really supports social learning, something that promotes and helps new people to meet, something that is driven by the participants, not the business or the trainer. I haven’t got much beyond that, but I’m convinced this is a great idea and I wanted to share it..

Let’s take presentation skills for starters. It’s probably the most popular course request we’ve had this year and last. How do you get good at presenting?

Practise.

A one day presentation skills course won’t make a blind bit of difference to your presentation skills, if you don’t actually deliver a presentation until six months later. And frankly the content they teach in these courses can be found online, in books, or gleaned from watching TED talks. But the space to practise and get feedback in a safe environment is not so easy to replicate.

Or is it?

If you can get three or four people together once a month to deliver an Ignite talk imagine how quickly they would improve. Watch their confidence grow. Watch their slide design improve. Pretty soon they would want to open up the sessions to a general audience. It could become a great business knowledge sharing tool, or it could just be some fun interesting stuff, or a mix of the two. It could potentially change the way people present in your company forever.

If you can establish something like this within a company it’s going to bleed into your online networks as well. So if you’ve built it and nobody came, it could be a really powerful way to change that.

But how does this differ from a lunch and learn which we see all the time? I think it needs an identity of it’s own. It needs branding and it needs to be something people can own, something they can steer and something they can really be a part of. It also needs to happen regularly.

The one nagging doubt I have is, can it work without beer?

Photo Credit: stevendepolo via Compfight cc

Advertisement

Love Learning Lives

A few months ago I tweeted about a new thing I was working on to help support and promote independent learning at work. I was a little premature in announcing it and we ended up pushing it back until January, which is why I’ve been quiet about it. But January is here and Love Learning is live. I’m going to commit to posting about it at least once a month to help me reflect on what is and isn’t working and to invite feedback to challenge my thinking. So feel free to be rude about it.

Last week our CEO announced the launch of Love Learning, our new campaign to promote independent learning, increase internal and external networking and improve collaboration and knowledge sharing habits across the company.

First up it’s a campaign, not a course or a series of  workshops. There is very little going on in terms of learning design, I’ve spent most of the past two months working on collateral instead of courseware. I spend more time editing intranet pages and curating content on scoop.it than I do story-boarding for Captivate.

So what is Love Learning if there’s no designed learning. Is it all hype and hyperbole?

It’s a marketing campaign, we’re selling people content and concepts. Each month has a theme, January is self-improvement, learning to learn more effectively with technology and setting goals you actually care about. Next month we get into the basic business skills that so many people seem to lack or take for granted. We start that part of the campaign with productivity, managing email, meetings, personal productivity techniques etc.

How does it work?

Each month starts with an article on the front page of the intranet news site to introduce the topic. We don’t have any fancy systems to use for this, our LMS is of no use in this respect and our intranet is barely serviceable to be honest. But we have managed to tweak (I would say hack, but that word gives my boss the fear) the news section of the intranet. It’s the one area that lets you add HTML code, so we’ve created a template that let’s us add images, icons to link to other parts of the campaign and a content slider showcasing our Scoop.it content. Everything else on the intranet is text with the odd picture on menu pages, so it stands out in a good way.

We aim to post two articles a week that develop the topic, invite participation and promote other resources for people to try. We can monitor engagement by the rudimentary tracker reports, it ain’t exactly WordPress, but it gives us some data to go on.
Scoop.it is the next important resource. We have a pro account, which so far is our only real outlay. It costs a whopping £8 a month, but we think it’s worth it because we get 10 topics and more detailed user data. This gives us a pretty good idea how many people are accessing scoop.it direct from the intranet and which articles are popular. As the campaign develops we hope to see more people with their own scoop.it accounts, which will also show up on the analytics.

We’re using Chatter to add a social community to the campaign. This is going to be a slow burner because only about 250 people have chatter accounts, we have to persuade the rest to join up and of course participate. So far we have two members of the Love Learning group ( and one of them is me)!

We’ll be running monthly webinars to round-up each topic and get some extra participation going and we are trying to convince marketing/comms to let us use their email marketing platform so we can send everyone a monthly roundup in the format they are most familiar with.

That’s the gist of it really. The hard work, which we’re just starting now, is getting people to try something different. We need managers to support and promote this from the top down. We’ve got support from the top. It was fantastic to get the CEO to launch the campaign in his New Year email. It means that we can name check him every time someone says “what’s Love Learning”. But the reality is we need to win hearts and mind all the way up and down the organisation. So we’re getting into as many manager meetings across the company to explain face to face what we’re doing, answer any questions and get feedback and insight.

It’s already become clear that the biggest barrier we have to overcome is time. One of the strengths of courses is that they give officially sanctioned time to learn. The problem with informal learning is that people can’t find, or aren’t allowed, the time to learn. The issue still afflicts courses, because when you get back to work you’re unlikely to get the time to reflect on how to implement what you learn.
So my no.1 challenge this year is to find a way for people to learn informally at work without feeling like they are doing something wrong.

I’m thinking about trying to get a find 15 or take 10 initiative going, but what other ways have you seen or tried that created space for learning at work?