Why Organizations Need Social Learning

The world has changed — people now live and work in a world where Google gives the answers, where a mobile phone is the lifeline to the Web and to your GPS location, and where Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter link people to each other in their own way. By leveraging these tools and putting them into meaningful parts of the learning experience, social learning tools enable organizations and their people to make sense of this radically changed day-to-day world and achieve their business and learning objectives.

How to leverage social learning

Enterprise social networking provides organizations with an unprecedented level of knowledge about its talent. Management can look at who are the most valuable contributors and where knowledge lies. It provides the organization greater agility in responding to a changing business environment.

Onboard new hires: how long does it take for people to get up to speed? 

Onboarding via social learning provides a getting-started experience tailored to the need and role of the individual. Supplemented by search, social learning enables new employees to discover and succeed almost immediately.

Cultivate knowhow through sharing informal knowledge: why wait for people to figure out what is trusted information and what is most important to learn?

What it takes to succeed in a job is more than a job description. After all, why don’t people just read the instructions and then immediately know what to do? The reason is that knowhow is transferred through insight, behavior, and trade knowledge not necessarily reflected in a formal training document.

Accelerate effectiveness and increase performance: what can be done to create additional levels of success for high performers?

High performers produce 10x or more the business results of average employees. They have learned that the law of success includes knowing what to ask and of whom, rather than ―knowing it all‖ themselves. Connecting people of deep knowledge on specific areas of interest makes the strategies and efforts of high-performing employees multiply in the business outcome. If a high performer can produce more effectively by networking with just a handful of key connections, imagine what can be accomplished through access to groups of hundreds of other high performers.

Harness informal learning: why spend money to create content when the highest-quality and most trusted content can be incorporated into learning for free?

The industry is aware that 70 to 80 percent of training budgets are spent on formal learning, but as many studies indicate, nearly 80 percent of what people actually learn within a job role is achieved informally. Learning is ultimately a change in behavior — and people learn through a triangulation of people, context, and need. Social learning funnels trusted content to the fore of learning’s view and can even be used to transition key informal learning objects into formal processes.

In other circumstances, a community’s knowledge need flares up and is a hot topic for but a few short days, weeks, or months, and then burns out. Formal objects will never meet the needs of these flares. But informal schemes of user-generated content, wikis, blogs, threaded conversations, and ad hoc virtual connections via meetings and conversations can meet the demands of these transitory learning experiences.

Transform your workforce: Do hierarchies really reflect the “wirearchy” of your business?

Identify key nodes in your organization by analyzing your social networks using dynamic network analysis. Who used what resources with what frequency, and with whom did they share? In the maps of teams, see what competencies and skills map to those teams and networks. Get beyond the skill level of individuals and start to identify team, group, and organizational competencies. Identify which collections of people are most skilled at solving the problems of the day. The hierarchy can’t reveal the difference between two regional groups of identical solutions consultants, but network analysis can reveal that one group excels at user interface customization while the other group excels at CRM integrations.

Prepare for succession: Why can’t organizations figure out who will succeed when they are advanced in the organization?

The formal measures of slating people for advancement miss the key textures of why people succeed at the next level. Creating a social fingerprint of the type of person that succeeds at the next level and then matching that pattern against those that meet your formal criteria is a start. In addition, social learning fast tracks people to connect to the networks and sources of learning that will accelerate the right people. For example, in nominations for leadership development, people can learn these skills from mentors with matching learning histories. Internal recruiting can match social learning experiences with transcript and profile information to meet internal need for talent.

Nurture employee networks: Why don’t people connect inside their current organization with people formerly in their role? In the learning they are undertaking? With people who went to the same school they did? With those who want to achieve the same career goals?

From the unified profile made visible as the hub of interaction in social learning, the workplace opens up because now instead of people seeing their world as a job role with colleagues and a manager, they see their workplace as a world of connections to people who share their experiences. For example:

• If I am a new hire, then I may want to connect to recent new hires. 
  
  
• If am taking on a new role, I can access people across the organization who currently or previously held my role. 
  
  
• Through “alumni” of different types, I can pursue the learning that was most effective for those before me and I can discover learning experiences that interest me most.

People and social learning

No aspect of people’s careers is untouched by the social learning experience. In today’s world, the shelf life of knowledge is short. People understand that what they learn, the knowledge they harvest, is perishable. People seek modern working environments where they are encouraged to stay current and connected. Business outcomes depend on the speed of such knowledge transfer and sharing of knowhow. Social learning tools keep employees engaged and empowered through the most powerful learning tool in the marketplace—each other.

article previously published on astd.org