“Everything is social! It’s not real until it’s on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!”
These are some of the anecdotal comments and off the cuff remarks that you’re likely to hear from both CIOs as well as cutting edge tweens. While the sentiment of an interactive, cloud based world is clear, what does that mean for today’s talent management and specifically corporate learning? What does it mean in terms of actionable items as well as planning for the future? It may be helpful to look at it as two aspects: something old and something new. From this perspective the nebulous “social” can narrow down to concrete plans that are both transitional steps as well as directions to start charting.
Something Old: “Gamification”
“Gamification” is applying game design elements, rewards, and approaches in a “non-game” environment. While it’s recently been applied to education and corporate learning, there are a number of elementary school teachers that can be sited for prior precedent. They already knew that the desire to win and thus get as many facts under the belt and the desire to collect “wins” and “gold stars” were more of a motivator than any chapter deadline they could assign. This desire to “play” and “level” or “win” amongst our peers can be a very powerful tool to tap into. That’s why the gold stars were handed out during class. That’s why the charts were published in an area where everyone could see how everyone stacked up.
Treating the structure and reward of a lesson as a game can shape how the lessons are approached at all levels. This could be as simple as a congratulatory message at the completion of each unit or online chapter. This could then be worked into creating leader boards and score keepers in a virtual or physical shared space. That is to say, leader boards can be in a break room of each office as they transition to a shared social environment like a company Facebook group or within your talent management system. In looking towards the future, future classes and campaigns can be designed with these game strategies built in.
Something New: “Mobile”
The prevalence of mobile devices and how they change all kinds of workflows has been such a paradigm shift that it’s hard to remember what things were like before them. However, it’s also sometimes hard to put into words how they have changed or even changed for the better. For one, the answers are expected to be instant. Users are expecting to be able to pull in short answers quickly. This has certainly been seen to settle a movie discussion, and also to answer questions that normally would have been emailed or prompted a visit to a manager or subject matter expert. And these answers are published and consumed more and more as short videos. No longer do you have to be Ira Glass to answer a question. Between TED and YouTube, short videos made on smart devices are kosher for more than just cooking.
What does this mean for a learning strategy? FAQs don’t have to be just text. The answers can be a quick video screen capture or a video shot and edited completely on a Smartphone. What users are focusing on is quickly finding the answers to their questions. So long as it is searchable and playable on their mobile devices in a quick and easy manner, it doesn’t need a full production studio behind it. Moving forward, short answers can be collected and your catalogue of answer videos built and refreshed.
These are just a few steps and directions to take. For a company as whole, a full social strategy for learning is more than just these two dimensions. However, these dimensions do highlight that even small steps and changes can be made to start charting and executing a path through the buzzwords to how users search for information and, more importantly, how they interact with it.