What+Are+The+Barriers?

= Barriers to Social Learning =

Success Story - Be a Yahoo!
Yahoo! recently implemented an online sales force platform for over 3,500 employees to use for their day to day work, including collaborating and learning. They are several years ahead of their competition on this, and their results are impressive. When we interviewed Mike Bellissimo, the head of the Growth, Enrichment, and Training Department, and his team, Laura Mishima, and Laura Moraros on November 14, 2001, they credited their success to: >>
 * Executive Buy-in:
 * Management support
 * Corporate culture of sharing
 * User Enthusiasm:
 * The Performance Support portion easy to use and contribute to
 * Initial users are power users who require the information on the platform to succeed in their jobs
 * Their first visit was positive and their old tools are not longer available so users return to the site

These characteristics were the basis of success for forward-thinking Yahoo!. Even with their best efforts, it took close to two years to go from an idea to implementation. Bellissimo and his team persevered through push back and politics. He recommends picking an “un-arguable” project (i.e. something that so obviously needed to be improved upon that no one could argue against it) (Michael Bellissimo, Global Sales Readiness: Enabling a culture of continuous learning lecture, September 2011, San Diego State University, Educational Technology Department). In many organizations, however, executive buy-in and user enthusiasm are barriers to successfully implementing social media. The next sections examine these barriers and boosts over them for the near future.

Barriers
According to Jane Bozarth, Ed.D. (personal communication, November 6, 2011), //management needs to support social learning// in the workplace for it to really take off in an organization. ”In almost every case, management philosophy (not a particular person, necessarily) is behind successful sweeping use. It's the difference, essentially, between the principal who sees cell phones as the biggest classroom disruption ever, and the one who sees them as classroom computers that the parents are paying for…Senior leadership can choose to allow itself to be held hostage by its own IT department. Organizations that want this can do it.” Companies that use Web 2.0 technologies, such as social learning, are achieving very promising results. In a McKinsey survey done in December 2010 of 3,249 executives shows that two-thirds of the respondents use Web 2.0 in their organizations. Seventy seven percent of companies that use these technologies were able to access knowledge faster -- on average, 30% faster. The table shows more key findings: Jane Hart blogs that corporate policies are one of the reasons social media hasn’t taken off. Many corporations forbid use of social media tools at work, even using hardware or software that the employee brings in. Often, privacy and security issues are cited as reasons.
 * ** Benefit ** || ** % Companies Reporting ** || ** Average % Improvement ** ||
 * Increasing speed of access to knowledge || 77 || 30 ||
 * Increasing number of successful innovations for new products/services || 28 || 20 ||
 * Reducing time to market for products/services || 28 || 20 ||
 * Increasing revenue || 18 || 15 ||

Boosts
Karie Willyerd (Vice President, Learning & Social Adoption at SuccessFactors) has ideas for overcoming these barriers (personal communication, November 3, 2011): “We need to turn fear of the unknown into excitement about opportunities…This is where the rhetoric is exactly the same as when email and the internet came into play. To overcome these barriers, deal with the real issues of security and privacy. How? Here are some ideas from Jane Hart:
 * First, you must have a good social media policy. See [|socialmediagovernance.com], and the access to over 170 policies from different kinds of companies.
 * Secondly, offer education on how to be a good digital citizen, like Intuit does.
 * Third, provide private social tools for use within a secure environment.
 * //**Finally, get over it!**// If someone wants to take something outside a company, they can and will. Zip drives are far more dangerous than an internal social network, which is far more transparent.” (Emphasis ours.)
 * Keep resources behind corporate firewall or use a public site’s private service
 * Create social networking resources behind organization’s firewall
 * Share advice on privacy settings and confidentiality with employees

Training and Development Department policies are also often a barrier to using social media for performance support. In many organizations, Training and Development is responsible for the training material’s accuracy and professional look. In addition, Training and Development must track all employee learning. When performance support is gleaned through social media, the Training and Development department is left out. These policies need to be re-examined.
 * First, collaboratively created content is accurate. At least one study showed that Wikipedia’s content was at least as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica’s.
 * Second, training materials do not need to look professional to be effective. To be effective, training material needs to be easily available, useable, and useful by being accessible on the company’s intranet, easily searchable with Google-like search capabilities, available on and built for hand-held devices, and have the content that employees are looking for.
 * Third, Training and Development does not need to track all employee training. The important thing is that employees are able to effectively, efficiently, and legally do their jobs. Training and Development departments should shift to helping individuals get the training and/or support that they say they need to do their jobs. They need to act as performance consultants for individuals rather than training providers for groups.

Barriers
Currently, workers do not choose social media when they need performance support. In fact, when Jane Bozarth analyzed survey responses to a recent eLearning Guild survey, she found that almost 30% of survey respondents did not plan to use social media for performance support. Yet performance support is an excellent fit for social media; performance support is for finding information that can be referenced, not memorized, and social media is about exchanging information.In the near future, Charles Jennings (performance consultant) blogs that using social media for performance support the way we use GPS for directions: getting immediate instructions for narrowly defined tasks.

Boosts
Jane Hart’s advice to organizations interested in capitalizing on social media in the near future is to actively support employees that are using social media, get out in front of employees who aren’t yet so their way is clear to use social media, and be careful to stay out of the way of both groups progress. To actively support employees already using social media, build on what they are doing by:
 * Changing corporate policies to allow use of the tools those employees are using
 * Buying the tools for them
 * Having IT support their tools

Karie Willyerd reiterates this in stronger terms in personal emails: “Organizations would be well advised to put in place their own social technologies if they want to know what the conversation is about, because it will happen with or without them. See the discussions on places like [|OpenDoor.com].” To encourage employees who are not yet using social media, Jane Hart suggests these ideas:
 * Help them find useful, trustworthy resources including social communities.
 * Help teams set up online support communities within the organization (this helps with privacy/security issues, too). Remember to start with individual’s need, not a top down approach.
 * Help individuals develop information filters (Personal Knowledge Management) to classify and organize information (ex. aggregate blog feed), encourage them to gather information and share it with their teams.

Marc Rosenberg’s web site (management consultant ) emphasies that companies need systems to manage social learning mediums. Mike Bellissimo agrees: Yahoo!’s platform replaces many different tools (including most emails, a variety of web sites, tools, and systems) that users had been using with one system. However, Jane Bozarth warns that the systems shouldn’t encourage overmanaging social media (which tends to kill grass roots initiatives). Another pitfall: expecting everyone to use it, every time. People fulfill their need for support differently. Social media is another tool, not the only tool.

Beyond Today’s Barriers
In the next 3-5 years, organizations who successfully capitalize on Web 2.0 will overcome the barriers, real and otherwise, that management and users bring to social learning. For these organizations, performance support through social networks will be as ubiquitous as emails are now. Other organization will still be mired in privacy, security, and sharing issues, to their detriment. For Yahoo! and other forward-acting organizations, where are the future pitfalls? > Yahoo!’s solution: Users and contributors understand that content will be updated at least every six months or it will be removed. Yahoo! is creating a new full time position with this responsibility. > Yahoo’s solution: The Growth, Enrichment, and Training Department is gathering metrics on adoption rates and satisfaction feedback to draw from for future platform improvements.
 * Keeping people engaged and the content up to date
 * Improving the platform based on user feedback

Once the rest of the industry catches up, they will face these hurdles as well.

Resources for More Information
Mike Bellissimo: http://twitter.com/#!/mbelliss Jane Bozarth: http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/ Jane Hart: http://c4lpt.co.uk/ Mark Rosenberg: http://www.marcrosenberg.com/ Karie Willyerd: [|http://twitter.com/#!/angler]