Does Your Company Allow You To Access Facebook From Work?

The number of people on Facebook has now exceeded 90 million and the fastest rowing segment of these new users are those over the age of 25. As a result, it’s becoming quite common to ask: Will you be able to access Facebook and other social networks from your work computer?

Or should you and your team be banned from access on a company network?

Gartner analysts Anthony Bradley and Nikos Drakos say corporations should not ban social applications such as Facebook, Twitter or social networks in the enterprise.

Their arguments come after a number of financial service companies in the financial services sector have stopped their employees from using such tools at work.

While the number of ways to collaborate with peers online is on the increase from using Microsoft SharePoint to joining online communities of practice, most of this increase can be traced to collaboration tools behind a company’s firewall.

But with Facebook claiming they have more than 90 million plus users online, should employees be able to access their Facebook profile or other online profile from their work computer?

Garnter argues YES and the way to do this according to Garnter anslysts, Anthony Bradley and Nikos Drakos is to create a “Trust Model,” meaning:

• define how to participate in these online social networks at work
• define the positive and negative ways to doing this
• present specific guidelines around such areas as expected online behavior, corporate policies on appropriate and ethical behavior and appropriate brand usage

So what are companies saying about all of this?

Here are the three barriers I hear to opening up these social networks at work. My question is this: how real are these barriers?

• Impact on Employee Productivity: Employees may spend so much time updating profiles their productivity will decrease. Yes, there are employees who will play games online but there are also employees who will seek out networks to improve their productivity—like joining a network on LinkedIn or Facebook related to their expertise.
• Impact on Company Network: Let’s say hundreds of employees are running virtual reality apps on Facebook or watching YouTube videos at the same time, are they sucking bandwidth from the company’s pipes?
• Impact on Company Brand: Employees that communicate online on their social networks need to be aware that their profiles on public social networking sites identify them as employees of a company, so their postings can have an impact on the company’s reputation and brand in the marketplace.

All this points to the importance of designing a “trust model” and set of guidelines before going forward. The bottom line I see is this:
Employees, especially Millennials, are living, communicating and networking online. They will bring a set of digital expectations to their employer and over time being able to access social networks from work will become important to the competitiveness of companies.

Think for a moment about what the world of work wil be like in 2020—won’t employees just assume they can access everything from their PDA/Smart phone—including, of course, learning?

Does your company allow you to access social networks from your work computer? Why or why not?

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, gartner, enterprise 2.0, new york times

The Secrets of Success for Online Communities

Last week’s post, “Is Your Online Community Delivering Value For Your Organization?” drew quite a bit of email traffic. The overwhelming response was this: Creating online communities can be a game-changing strategy for a learning & development function - if you are clear about your business objective and how to engage and reward participation.

The graphic above is taken from the AFOL community, or Adult Fans of Lego. These adult fans make up 10% of Lego’s billion-dollar business. My advice: Chief Learning Officers should take a page from Chief Marketing Officers. Learn what drives success in these communities and as noted in the excellent book, Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, begin your journey to build a community by asking yourself key questions such as:

1. What business objectives are you trying to achieve?
2. What pain points/passions/areas of general interest do your community members need help with or want to give assistance to?
3. How will you support and maintain the community? Communities are cheap to launch but to be effective they must be constantly supported with new content, new features and new designs.
4. How will you measure success? Think beyond just the number of visitors and number of page views to business metrics such as increases in the engagement of employees and customers and decreases in costs.
5. What are the incentives? Community members need to be rewarded for their participation.

Now how do these lessons apply to an internal community that a learning & development department may launch? There is actually quite a bit of overlap - one can ask the same questions, the answers will differ for an internal community versus an external community, but the overall secrets to success are the same, namely:

• Start with a business objective
• Understand the passion of your potential community members
• Build into your budget the resources to support and maintain the community (think beyond technology resources to people and training resources)
• Set metrics early on to measure your success in business terms
• Be creative about providing rewards and incentives for participation - remember your employees contribute to a community in addition to the demands of their “day job”

What other “secrets of success” do you have in running and managing online communities of practice? Share them by either posting a comment or sending me an email.

Technorati Tags: Online communities; Groundswell, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Learning Officer

Is Your Online Community Delivering Value For Your Organization?

As learning organizations experiment with leveraging Web 2.0 tools to create online communities of practice, many Chief Learning Officers, heads of human resources and talent management should take a lesson from Chief Marketing Officers who have created online communities for marketing purposes. Many of these online communities have failed, and sadly, produce fancy web sites that few customers ever visit. Let me state, I am a strong advocate of online communities of practice for extending learning into the workplace. But, we, are learning professionals, must learn from the marketing pro’s about what works and how to create and nurture engaging online communities, and avoid them become a ghost town.

In a groundbreaking survey of 100 businesses that have created online communities for marketing purposes, Deloitte found that many of these sites fail to gain traction with customers. In fact, the statistics outlined below are a reason for CLO’s and human resources professionals to pause before launching their own online communities.

Of the 100 businesses surveyed by Deloitte:

• Thirty-five percent of the online communities have less than 100 members
• Less than 25% have more than 1,000 members
• 6% of businesses spent over $1 million to launch these online communities

So why is this happening? Deloitte identified a number of common blunders that we can take note of before undertaking online communities for learning purposes:

• Blunder #1: Bells and Whistles trap: Companies launching online communities often get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Alternative: Do research to understand the needs and “pain points” of the online community instead of investing in the latest technology tools that you fall in love with.
• Blunder #2: Too few resources are spent on community management and facilitation. Remember this is a new endeavor for both the company and the potential community members. Deloitte found that 45% of the survey respondents identified poorly managed online communities as a significant barrier to their effectiveness. Survey respondents stated the quality of the community manager and their online facilitation skills were two features that greatly impact a community’s success.
• Blunder #3: A lack of hard business metrics. While business that create online communities for marketing purposes say they do this to generate customer loyalty and word of mouth marketing, their most frequent metric is simply the number of hits to the site. Some metrics proposed include: number of in-bound links, rankings in Google and impact on the share of market numbers.

Some questions for you to consider:

• Are you putting the “right” people, processes and technologies in place to create, sustain and nurture online communities?
• How are you measuring the success of these online communities?
• Are you connecting with the “marketing folks” at your organization to learn how they are using online communities?

Share your thoughts. I look forward to your comments.

Technorati Tags: Online communities; Deloitte, Chief Learning Officer, Chief Marketing Officer

Does Your Intranet Operate Like Google?

The answer is most likely no, your Intranet is not nearly as easy to use as Google. But a growing number of companies are looking to their Intranet to do just that - operate in a social way so employees can share, collaborate and find information.

While I have written in past posts about the benefits of starting a company blog, there is no reason why blogging should be your first foray into the world of social media. In fact, I could build a case that maybe you should start with a project that is not threatening to your IT or legal department, not to mention your PR department. Re-vamping your company Intranet to include wiki’s, tagging rating and even image galleries may in fact be an interesting starting point on your path toward social media.

One company that is actually doing this is a brand name you will know, especially if you are single - eHarmony.com. Online dating is a big and growing business. According to Jupiter Communications Inc, in 2003 consumers spent $313 million on US based dating Web sites and this number will climb to more than $600 million by the end of 2008. eHarmony is the Internet’s fastest growing relationship service and its user base is doubling every quarter, adding 10,000-15,000 new users a day, the company is growing at 30% a year with over 20 million registered users in all 50 states and 191 countries. In fact, you can impress your friends by asking them if they know how many people who meet on eHarmony actually end up getting married? Answer 236 every day.

Now that I have your attention, let’s focus on the eHarmony Intranet - it was broken. It required knowledge of HTML coding to make changes and was very cumbersome to use. So the eHarmony HR Head decided to re-vamp the company Intranet as a way to build greater employee collaboration and knowledge sharing. The company behind this effort is accurately named, ThoughtFarmer and they have been called the company that builds engaging Intranets for “Intranet-haters.”

But the story gets more interesting because as a result of re-vamping the eHarmony Intranet, more departments at eHarmony are putting their information on the Intranet and encouraging employees to contribute new ideas through the new Intranet. All of this improved communication has actually resulted in new ideas for product improvements and cost savings at eHarmony.

Now the question for readers: as more companies explore using the Intranet for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing, who owns the responsibility for researching and then re-vamping the intranet - IT, HR or Marketing & Communications? Answer–all of the above. The Intranet was once an IT initiative but now it is a business initiative with HR often taking the lead in forming a cross functional team to re-vamp both the company Intranet as well as the HR/Learning portal. Why? Because having a voice on projects which provide tangible business outcomes is the future in many evolving HR and Talent roles.

Share with us - who owns your Intranet and do you see your involvement in a re-design as part of your role?

Technorati Tags: ThoughtFarmer, social media, intranet, Human Resrouces, eHarmony

Corporate Social Responsibility And Global Talent Development

While the heightened awareness of corporate social responsibility was originally borne out of business scandals and crisis, it is now here to stay as a business strategy. As Coca-Cola’s Chairman and CEO E. Neville Isdell said in the company 2006 Corporate Responsibility Review (opens PDF), “businesses must be a force for positive global change—one community at a time.”

Isdell believes that committed employees who believe in the company they work for, perform better. It’s that simple. He then goes on to say these employees who believe in the company’s mission often times have higher levels of employee morale, productivity and ultimately this translates favorably into the company’s brand. So for a company’s corporate social responsibility efforts to have real value, they must have a “line of sight” connection to the business goals. If they do not, they are really just philanthropy.

As I was reading about Coca-Cola’s CSR strategy I was thinking how we as learning and talent development professionals provide opportunities for our employees to be engaged in learning & development while also being involved in corporate social responsibility projects on behalf of the company. While it may seem a stretch, I think the next alliance within FORTUNE 500 firms will be between the heads of talent development and the heads of a company’s foundation. Some companies are already headed in this direction—notable is UBS Learning & Development who has begun to build alliances with a number of key philanthropies to build leadership development “moments of learning” into the CSR projects.

Why does this make so much sense? Well, the target audience of Millennial managers has most likely been involved in social responsibility projects for most of their student and working lives. It is a natural extension to combine learning & development with corporate social responsibility. In fact a recent survey conducted by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education surveyed 1,943 students ages 26-30 years old at 15 business schools to find out about their attitudes towards business and society.

Top line findings included of this Aspen Institute survey include:

• Business students are thinking more broadly about the primary responsibilities of a company. In addition to citing shareholder maximization and satisfying customer needs, more students are also saying “creating value for the communities in which they operate” should be a primary business responsibility.
• MBA students are expressing more interest in finding work that offers the potential of making a contribution to society (26% of respondents in 2007 say this is an important factor in their job selection compared with 15% in 2002).

These Millennials do in fact appear to be interested in integrating CSR with broader business goals. As you consider how you can build a bridge between these two initiatives, ask yourself a few questions:

• What is the current alliance between CSR and Talent Development functions?
• Is your company’s approach to CSR based upon business priorities and achieving business objectives? This should be the same as its approach to talent management.
• What specific business outcomes are you working to achieve in your CSR and how are these consistent with your business outcomes needed from leadership programs?
• What pilot projects can be started as a way to build a partnership between your company’s Foundation and Talent Management?

The champions of CSR and Talent Management really both want the same end result—to make CSR and Talent Management a major part of the core decision-making process at senior levels.

Is your company beginning a dialogue to partner with CSR efforts? What has been your experience? What are lesson learned? How are you reporting these efforts?

I hope you share this with our readers so we can start a conversation.

Moving Learning From General Motors Production Model to Google Search and Find Model

We held our first meeting of the Learning Innovation Network at Sun Microsystems this week. The focus of the dialogue and discussion was around the range of innovations we are experimenting with in corporate learning. This includes an enterprise web 2.0 toolkit of blogs, wikis and online communities as well as metaphorical learning experiences, focused on designing learning with impact while meeting key business outcomes.

We had a wide ranging discussion of how learning will change and evolve from a traditional function to one that is more integrated into the fabric of every employee’s life. Key themes that emerged include:

1. The team from Sun Microsystems kicked off the event with a major theme we discussed for the rest of our day and half. The trend, dubbed, “Learning 2.0″ is moving corporate learning from structured programs to collaborative learning experiences. This means top-down push learning is being replaced by self service “pull” learning with an overall goal of taking our General Motors production model for designing and delivering learning and shifting this to a Google-like search model.

Sun is determined to push its LMS system (currently the heart of its learning system) to the periphery of a new, strategic (and open source) tool that will allow flexible, web-enabled learning from anywhere, including mobile devices, and will encourage employees to contribute to course content creation.

2. Learning is becoming more social, informal, continuous and embedded in our daily activities. While the term “social learning” has gained a cult status, the ability to collectively create and collectively understand is becoming a mandatory skill for employees at all levels. In fact, credit Suisse shared their online virtual communities of practice model which connects employees to others in the organization based on their skills and knowledge sets. It makes it easy to find expertise, to “know what Credit Suisse knows.”
3. Learning is becoming more mobile. Millennials view the Internet as something that comes to them not something they go to. With over 2 billion mobile devices in use, mobiles have now eclipsed PC’s in the marketplace. We should remember that as we consider delivery options for current and new programs. At Sun Microsystems, technical training is being delivered globally to field engineers on their iPhones, seems like this model will continue to gain traction in the coming months.
4. Finally, after many demo’s of new tools, programs, games for learning and metaphorical learning experiences, we closed with the need for learning professionals to:
   • Focus less on how technology is changing learning and more on how the learners, especially the 80 million Millennials, are bringing new expectations and demands to the workforce. These include being able to use the same applications they have grown up with, such as Instant Messaging, Mobile web conferencing, BlackBerries and video-sharing on-the-job.
   • Be open to new needs and expectations of four generations in the workforce.
   • Understand and share how to make change happen in an organization. It’s not easy but there are lessons in how to improve your odds of success with implementing innovations in corporate learning.

if you are interested in learning more about the Learning Innovation Network, send me an email at jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com We are looking for more learning departments operating “on the edge.”

Technorati Tags: Millennials, Sun Microsystems, Google, BlackBerry, Web 2.0, Learning Innovation Network

How Do I Unlock The Knowledge Of A Few For The Benefit Of The Masses?

Unlocking the knowledge of your “stars” for the purpose of building collective intelligence seems to be the goal of a growing number of learning and talent management professionals. Here’s one direct question from the head of learning of a FORTUNE 500 firm:

“How do I identify the stars within the enterprise, motivate them to share their knowledge and then empower them with a toolkit that is seamless?”

Do you recognize yourself in this quote?

In fact, AMR Research estimates that in 2007 the total amount spent on knowledge management was $73 billion and this is expected to grow by 16% in 2008. Why? I believe that increasingly companies are going to great lengths to capture and utilize the vast amounts of unstructured information that is flowing through, and around them. KM (Knowledge Management) is a vast, catch-all phrase that encompasses all kinds of software from portals to search engines to content management systems. Now the decisions around how to unlock this knowledge becomes more complex because more and more questions get raised:

• Does this synch with your company’s Social Media strategy?
• Do you want your application to be “searchable?”
• Can users create content that is both public and private?
• Finally, what polices and guidelines need to change as you attempt to “unlock” this knowledge for the benefit of all?

According to Forrester Research, 50% of the Global 2000 are planning to adopt some type of enterprise 2.0 solutions by 2013. This equates to a $4.6 billion market. The chart below shows how companies of various sizes are looking to adopt Web 2.0 in their respective organizations. So, if you work at a Global 2000 company (defined as having 20,000 employees) your organization is either in a buying mode or considering buying enterprise 2.0 software. Here are a few questions for you:

• Is your Human Resources and/or Learning department involved in this decision?
• Have you made a presentation to your department and to your IT department about the issues you need solved in order to unlock this knowledge?
• Have you created relationships with key “influencers” in the organization so your point of view is understood and heard.

Let me know where you are in this process. What’s clear is that with a market the size of $4.6 billion there will be a number of alternatives to consider in building the best solution to tapping into your organization’s collective wisdom.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, Web 2.0, Forrester, Groundswell, AMR Research

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Online Games: Ready For Prime Time Leadership Development?

The May issue of Harvard Business Review is now off the shelves but the cover story, entitled, “Leadership’s Online Labs,” by Bryon Reeves, Thomas Malone and Tony O-Driscoll has become a buzz among Chief Talent Officers and Chief Learning Officers.

If you are like me and did not grow up playing multiplayer online games also known as MMORPG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) it is important to give you some context. Multiplayer online games are a large and growing market with current estimates topping 50 million users. World of Warcraft alone has 10 million players who each pay a subscription fee of $15 a month. According to the Palo Alto Research Center, participants’ play an average of 20 hours a week, their average age is 27 years old and 85% are male. They are not exactly your typical corporate employee, but the question is this: What can we learn from how these virtual teams form to solve a problem and then disband?

Questions about what the participants do when they play these games has caught the interest of corporate talent and learning officers. Essentially, they are facing the same organizational challenges as many of our leaders in today’s FORTUNE 500 firm, namely they are:


• In constant recruitment mode
• Experimenting with being creative about motivating and rewarding top talent
• Using the latest collaborative tools so global teams can be constantly connected to each other
• Incorporating more personalization into day-to-day interactions with team players

So, if we believe these online games are a preview for what leaders will be facing in the next few years, what can we learn about what works? Here are some lessons and observations from Leadership’s Online Labs article:

1. Think first about how to change the game rather than solely focusing on “building individual leadership competencies.” Two suggestions: First think about offering immediate individual and non-monetary team rewards. This can range from public ratings and ranking systems recognizing stellar individual contributions (think Amazon ratings here) to devising a game-inspired set of incentives where players have visibility into what their reward will be if their team is successful. As the HBR article states, “the power of online games is that people care very much about the virtual gains and losses, even if the currency that records them can’t be exchanged for dollars.” So the processes we set up for documenting individual contributions and allowing these to be rated, commented on and ranked is a very powerful incentive.
2. Create more detailed views into the profiles of team members as I discussed last week in my article, “Performance Learning 2.0“. The static employee profile used for decades by human resource officers is slowly being replaced by a “personal employee tag cloud” where you can view a snapshot of an employee’s personal and professional life—courses taken, language fluency, projects worked on and work/life goals for next few years. But a note of caution here, employees will ask how this data will be used and companies will need to develop a set of guidelines and policies if they go down this road.

Some questions for you and your teams as you leverage the lessons of online games:

• What is your Facebook Strategy? This has come to mean do you have a strategy for embedding social media into your learning/talent development offerings? This does not have to also mean losing control or taking risks regarding security. Rather, it implies that your organization is making a commitment to experiment with using social media as a way to become relevant to the Millennial Generation.
• How much of your Learning & Talent Management staff is from the Millennial Generation? Are you tapping into this mindset as you partner with your customers to design and develop new programs?
• Are you taking the lead to “educate” your organization’s IT department on how game-inspired processes and incentives may need to be created to attract, develop and retain Millennial Generation. For example, have you created a presentation on social media for learning and shared this with your IT department? Remember IT departments need to be brought along early rather than having Human Resources “come up with a solution and then try selling it to IT.” One way companies are doing this is appointing a Chief Technology Officer for their learning department.

Please share your thoughts with our growing community and me.

Technorati Tags: Online games, talent management, Harvard Business Review, Leadership Development, Facebook

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Performance Management 2.0

Managers frequently cite completing performance appraisals as one of their least favorite tasks and that is often an understatement. But quietly there is a movement afoot to “consumerize” business software. This means that software is being designed and tested by “user experience teams” with the goal of making software “intuitive,” engaging and, importantly, free of training.

This consumerization of business software, a term coined by Gartner, Inc, will have a tremendous impact on our employees. Increasingly, employees on-the-job will come to expect software to be as easy to use as creating a profile on Facebook or an account on Ebay. They will no longer tolerate training courses or training manuals that go through endless “how-to-use” scenarios. Instead, they will expect an “IPod” experience — elegant, fun and engaging. Take a moment to think about the software your department uses, can you say this? Often the norm is one where employees endure lengthy training or spend hours poring over reference manuals only to be more confused than when they first downloaded the program.

One company leading this movement is SuccessFactors, a company providing performance and talent management solutions to over 3 million employees in 1,750 companies. Looking at the current solutions and those about to be released, it seems clear such sites as Facebook, Ebay and Amazon have inspired them. The latest offering of SuccessFactors, called SuccessDirectory, is a Web 2.0-based collaboration solution that enhances a company’s Employee Profile section in its Performance Management solution to include social media technologies like tagging and social networking.

Let’s assume for the moment that you work on a global team and collaborate everyday with team members across the globe that you have never met in person. Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a profile here where you could share your educational background, work history, post a photo of your choosing, list your professional training, languages you currently speak, ones you want to learn over next few years, books and music you enjoy, hobbies and some information about your family? In fact, creating and sharing your profile, could really help you get to know your virtual team members better and may even lead to doing your job better.

Why will this movement be so important? Well, if you have a teenager, like I do, you know how they download new software or personalize their cell phone. Do they ever read the manual? Of course not. They just dive in and use it. With 80 million Net Gener’s about to enter the workforce these Millenials will demand their professional networking be similar to how they build their personal networks. But as the head of Talent Management or Learning at your organization, here are some questions I would ask a company touting an enhanced Performance Management solution:

• What has been the research with Millennials in using performance management solutions with a social networking component?
• Do these programs impact recruitment and retention of Millennials?
• Can anyone across the entire organization access my profile or is it like Facebook where you can grant access?
• What is the process for updating these internal profiles if the new data is outside taking a new course?

Let’s say I just learned a new language “on my own time” but updating this may be the last thing I remember to do. But if I know that updating my internal profile will impact my chances for promotion, then I am motivated to review my profile on monthly basis and update with every new skill, course, etc.

Share your experience with integrating social networking into performance management. What has been the reaction of your employees (especially the Millennials where social networking is in their DNA)?

Technorati Tags: millennials, net generation, successfactors, social media, social networking, web 2.0

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Jet Blue University Uses Own Faculty To Test Social Media Tools

I have been giving seminars this past month on how companies are experimenting with social media to maximize knowledge sharing and collaboration and one theme is consistent across companies of various sizes and locations: they are turning to their training departments to be the test beds for using new social media tools like blogs and wiki’s.

This is the case with Jet Blue University (JBU), the corporate university of Jet Blue Airlines. Jet Blue University has 200 faculty spread across three locations, in Orlando, Florida (where they train flight crews), in Queens, NY (where they train operations and technical crews) and in Salt Lake City ( the training arm for reservations and customer services representatives).

Early in 2008, Jet Blue University powered its training faculty with a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs and wiki’s as a way for them to share best practices and be the pioneers for social media tools. Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at Jet Blue University, says that the main driver to experimenting with these new technologies is to capture process improvements and “next” practices that are working among faculty across the country.

It really makes a lot of sense for companies to use their “learning organization” to test out new ways to collaborate and share best practices. First, for employees in the learning department of an organization, part of their job is to share best practices around the enterprise. However, often they have been frustrated with their company’s attempts at knowledge management systems. So now they can become blogger champions and learn first-hand the power of social media while using the tools to do their job—share lessons learned across their community of peers..

Secondly, while the training faculty may have good intentions about sharing best practices, they often lack an easy tool that allows them to collaborate with their peers. So, I can see how empowering the training faculty to be a community of blogger and wiki champions can create excitement and even be a vehicle to re-invent and re-brand an entire learning organization. Some topic areas to think about having your faculty share best practices using blogs and wikis’ include, new-hire employee on-boarding, leadership development of high potentials and even company-wide blogging guidelines, assuming the company then decides to expand this initiative enterprise-wide.

Finally, professionals in a company’s learning organization want to “role model” what is expected across the organization. What better way to be a role model business unit than to be the first to use these new social media tools.

The Jet Blue University’s social platform, which went live early this year, was provided by Awareness, a company that focuses on delivering enterprise-wide blogs and wiki’s to both internal and external communities.

In fact, the folks at Jet Blue University are so enamored with their “experiment” that they went ahead and made a series of videos describing why they did this. Tune in to hear what they say below:

So, is your learning department taking the lead to “test out” new social media tools for the enterprise? What has been your experience to date?