Interviews
How to succeed when making the move to Social Learning

How to use social media to deliver classroom content and how to apply social media to learning beyond the classroom? Which are the objections to learning through social media? What are the best practices for employees to engage with ideas and their teams? Interview with Ann Bailey - Senior Learning Partner at Siemens Learning Campus US.

 

(@americalearning) Ann Bailey has a profound understanding of how to help people become a better version of themselves. With more than 25 years of experience in leadership and management development, she leverages her cross-organizational expertise to develop, implement, and facilitate local and global programs. Ann’s career started in technical training and then progressed into customer service, people skills, and leadership development topics. Having worked with nonprofit, public, and private sector organizations from the United States, Europe, and Asia, she is a proven resource for helping organizations and leaders obtain results. Ann currently serves as a learning partner for Siemens Learning Campus US, and is based in Alpharetta, Georgia.

 

This year Ann will be speaker at ATD 2016 (Colorado Convention Center, Denver, US, May 22-25) with Jessica Williams - Senior Learning Partner at Siemens Learning Campus US. The title of their session: “How to Succeed When Making the Move to Social Learning”.

 

Anticipating this session Ann Bailey said: “Social media is a gateway to connecting to what's hot, what's not, and building relationships with your customers and influencers. Find out how one company became an early adopter of the social media revolution and is transforming its employee base into social learning ambassadors. Hear its success story from the past three years, and how its methodologies have proven effective. During this session you will peer into the company's social network, understand pre-program planning, and look behind the scenes into best practices for taking your employee development to the next level, such as alumni networks and manager forums. You'll also experience a live demonstration, where you will actively apply social learning techniques that will transform your learning programs into employee-centric communities through LinkedIn. You will walk away with the ability to transform a social network tool into a valued platform for your learning programs”.

 

How to succeed when making the move to social learning?

 

To succeed when making the move to social learning you need to keep the goal in mind. By that I mean remembering what is important to your stakeholders and audience. In our case we wanted to make the move to Social Learning because our employee base and office settings were changing. Most managers carry two things – a cell phone and a laptop. By moving towards social learning we were better able to maximize those manager tools and provide a strong global network/social learning platform. We also wanted to leverage the knowledge in our management teams across the globe, and the best way to do that was social learning.

 

Can you give us some tips on how to use social media to deliver classroom content and how to apply social media to learning beyond the classroom?

 

To deliver content via social media, we integrated social learning into the course content exercises by using discussion and social network postings. We developed conversations via social media in the room. These conversations then reached people outside of the classroom, thus taking it beyond the classroom. We also created a public group where participants were able to share knowledge, example, links, and resources after the course. With everyone who attended using the same group the knowledge began to grow exponentially across North America.

 

As for learning beyond the classroom, we have created active social networking groups by content and/or topic where anyone – even those who have not attended a class or program – can read, share, contribute and learn from each other. Once people see the power of sharing/learning via social networking they see the value and want to contribute.

 

Which are the objections to learning through social media? How can we overcome them?

 

We encountered several objections. Not everyone enjoys social media, so we ensure that what is posted in our programs and groups is professional and pertinent to employees in the workplace. Not everyone know how to ‘think’ social media, so we designed exercises and activities in our programs to use it, learn it, value it so people could better understand social learning without fear or hesitation. We also heard a lot of people telling us they did not have time to participate in social media at work – they did not see the value. By having them join groups related to topics or teams that impact their daily work, they began to see the value of social learning.

 

What are the best practices for employees to engage with ideas and their teams?

 

To engage employees and a team, it helps to lead by example. If you want people to participate in social learning there needs to be something there they want to learn. As the manager or leader of a group/team you may have to be the one putting our content first, and then encouraging others to join. Over time by consistently adding new and valuable information via social media people begin to participate and value it as a resource to make their world better. One manager in our program did not want anything to do with social media/learning. He had no time nor did he value this tool. We encouraged him to join just to check it out. When he got into a group, he saw every member of his team was already there conducting great best practice sharing…he then realized he was missing out by being stubborn and not learning a new tool.

 

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May 2016