Best Practices
8 steps to introducing social learning successfully into the workplace

There are a number of reasons for employing social technologies in a workplace. When used to their full potential and with a clear goal in mind they can enhance social learning in your organisation and help you address many of the work challenges you’re facing everyday as a HR and L&D professional.

 

(@americalearning) Commelius, one of the UK’s largest providers of training, learning technologies and business change consultations to organisations around the globe, published the whitepaper ‘8 steps to successfully embracing social learning at work’ - an interesting research about one of the main learning trends.

 

Here are a summarized approach to Commelius top tips in making social learning part of your organisation’s L&D strategy (to access the full analysis of these steps, download Commelius withepaper here):

 

1. Start with the right portal. You need a place where learners can interact with each other and, crucially, where you can capture those interactions.

 

2. Develop the best learning environment for your people. Before you add social features to your portal, you need to decide what sort of social learning environment you’d like to create for your learners.

 

3. Arm your learners with the right tolos. When you understand the kind of social learning environment you need, the next step is to provide your learners with the tools which will support that environment. There are four types of social learning tolos (Bersin & Associates: Learning Systems 2011): communication/ conversation tools, content tools, connection tolos and collaboration tolos.

 

4. Create a positive first social learning experience – explain the tolos. Placing social learning features before your learners doesn’t mean they will know how and why to use them.

 

5. Come up with a mini social learning Project. When testing new technologies or features, it’s a good idea to launch a small project to spark people’s interest and to get them familiar with the tools you want them to use.

 

6. Think ‘learning community’ and build it. Once your learners are familiar with the portal and its social learning tools it’s time to start building your learning communities.

 

7. Use social learning tools to discover hidden talent. With collaboration tools, your social learning portal becomes a learner-driven environment  where experiences, information and ideas are gathered and shared.

 

8. Evaluate the success of the programme. So, by now, your portal has become the first place people in your organisation go to learn new things, to discuss ideas and to share resources and experiences.

 

Access whitepaper: ‘8 steps to successfully embracing social learning at work’