Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Employee development and motivation

Published
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Joost Robben
on December 18, 2009
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Managers and L&D officers increasingly tell me they need for employees to make themselves responsible for their own learning and development process.

One of the ways to help employees to gain insight in their learning process and to make it visible to their managers is by using e-portfolio’s. Especially when you look at e-portfolio’s from a reflective and development perspective. Weblogs can help employees in this process of reflection.

For the past couple of weeks i’ve had regular web-meetings with Jeffrey Keefer on this subject. An aspect returned in almost every discussion is motivation. We questioned ourselves how to motivate employees to actively engage in this process of development. Preferably in a networked environment where people not solely reflect individually but share and discuss their reflections with others in order for organizational learning to occur.

An article by Nohria, Groysberg & Lee (July 2008) in Harvard Business Review, presents a model for employee motivation. Partly based on results of neuroscience it is suggested that “that people are guided by four basic emotional needs, or drives, that are the product of our common evolutionary heritage”:

  1. The drive to acquire (obtain scarce goods, including intangibles such as social status)
  2. The drive to bond (form connections with individuals and groups)
  3. The drive to comprehend (satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us)
  4. The drive to defend (protect against external threats and promote justice)

Thinking about how to motivate your employees to engage with using e-portfolio’s you can think of several ways how this can contribute to the first three drives. I can see how blogging can play a role in profiling yourself and what you do to others in the organization - world. This could fulfill the drive to acquire as it might improve your social status. Blogging could also contribute to the drive to bond as its interaction possibilities help you to connect with others. One thing that I especially appreciate in blogging is that through these reflections in blog posts i try to understand the world around me. Unfortunately I think that for a lot of people the drive to defend is an extremely strong force. As publicly blogging your reflections might improve your social status, one also might believe it could be decreased. One might also think readers would disapprove their writings and as a result would disconnect. These fears encourage the drive the defend.

In my latest paper on social learning technologies with Robin Yap, we have written about the importance of trust. I believe this is also important in this discussion on motivation. If we can offer a safe (learning) environment, we might be able to diminish people’s drive to defend.

Any comments on how you try to work on this in your organization are more then welcome!

#oeb2009: Relate to business goals for learning to have impact

Published
by
Joost Robben
on December 14, 2009
in Uncategorized
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It has been a week now since I was in Berlin at the Online Educa (#oeb2009). Prior to the conference I said in another post that I would experiment with using Mindmeister as a LIVE online mindmap tool. I wanted to experiment with new ways to create notes and instantly share and connect with others through that.

Well, in the end, Online Educa didn’t seem to be that online at all. Connections mostly were real slow or not available (eg. when attending a session across the street). Therefore at times I needed to get my little paper-notebook and completed my mindmap back home. Well, ok, opportunity for improvement i’d say. I was very satisfied with using mindmaps for taking notes. Next time I would love to connect with a few others to co-create a mindmap and see whats going on else-where.

Main theme

Thinking about main theme’s at the conference I realized that this is very personal and strongly related to my passion, things I’m working on at the moment and possibly also some frustrations:). The main thing that i repeatedly have seen coming back in various sessions is the need to relate to business goals in order for learning to have impact. (and yes this relates to my personal context).

Charles Jennings mentioned as one of the current fundamental changes the movement from learning as an event towards viewing learning as a process. Learning continuously embedded in the work process. I’m not sure if this was his wish, or something he had seen already emerging. In my view, looking for learning to embed in the process is one of the key aspects for L&D to have success. Also, many times, there not being paid any attention to. The reason for this might actually well be, what Jennings calls the conspiracy of convenience.

“A manager comes to a training manager and says ‘I’ve got a problem, I need training’. The training manager says ‘fine, we’ll develop a training programme’. So the training manager develops the programme, delivers it to the business and no-one measures it. The business manager is happy because they feel they’ve filled their requirement, the training manager is happy because they’ve done what they think their job is about, i.e. delivered training, and because no-one measures it, nothing really happens, but everyone’s happy….we need to break that conspiracy.” (quote from Newswire article)

When I talked about this with learning developers, their initial reaction was “you mean we need to do ROI?”. Could be, but moreover I would like a more process consulting approach (see eg. Ed Schein). Up front, try to discover the real need, why is your client or colleague asking for this training? What is the business problem behind this question? Try to actively engage the client/ colleague in the design process. Is training really the means to solve the problem. Afterwards, you can do research and come up with figures on the business impact but it depends on the situation if this is what you want. Mostly, it would be a great start to actually start the process of questioning the business impact (which is different from learning goals!!). Relate to business and help your client in this process of determining the impact of learning intervention.

Visiting Online Educa Berlin

Published
by
Joost Robben
on December 1, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Tonight I will travel to Berlin for this years Online Educa Conference ( #oeb2009). My colleagues Stanley Portier, Kasper Spiro, Randy Vermaas and Egbert van de Winckel will also join so we are with quite a group. It will be the first time I’m attending this conference, really curious about it.

The following sessions seem interesting to me:

Thursday

  • The great training robbery (Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche)
  • Demonstrate Value, engagae business ( which is at the same time as the training robbery…)
  • Recession, an open door for learning innovation?

Friday

  • Responding to the changing world of work
  • Narrative and storytelling in teaching and learning
  • Workplace learning
  • Standards for best mobile practice

Live Mindmapping experiment

If good connections are available, i will try to “mindmap” the sessions that i attend live and direct in this mindmap on mindmeister.com