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Employee development and motivation

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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
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Joost Robben
on December 14, 2009
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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
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Joost Robben
on December 1, 2009
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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


New paper on leveraging social learning technologies

Published
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Joost Robben
on November 19, 2009
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Over the last time, I’ve been working on the startup of a new research project. I’m doing this together with Robin Yap from Toronto, Canada. We’ve met two years ago during an AHRD conference in Oxford and stayed in touch ever since (off course through the use of web technologies).

The research we are working on concerns the issues that we have encountered as (organizational) learning consultants which is the often technology centered focus during implementations of social web technologies. Our aim with this study is to develop a model that could assist in determining how social learning technologies in the workplace can be leveraged to engage, build relationships, and enhance the learning of individuals in corporate environments.

Last week we have finished our first draft of a paper which is submitted as a proposal to the Networked Learning conference in Aalborg next year. From the literature review, we have noticed the importance of trust for leveraging social learning. The model we propose in this paper explores trust as a foundation for the development of social capital in organization and explored how HRD can contribute to that with the use of webtechnologies.

We would appreciate your feedback on this research in progress.

Download the paper: A model for leveraging social learning technologies in corporate environments

Cloudworks from a CoP perspective

Published
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Joost Robben
on November 17, 2009
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Yesterday i attended the virtual fieldtrip from the CP Square community which was on the Cloudworks initiative.  Grainne Conole, as “expedition leader” gave us a tour around the isle of cloudworks. Yeah, really tropical :), as Cloudworks was described as:

“an island for sharing, discussing & finding learning and teaching ideas and designs.”

The sharing of teaching ideas and designs is the site’s strategy, therefore the site functions as a big hub of lots of emergent CoP’s evolving around the shared interest in teaching and learning design. I wondered if the technology would also be interesting to be used in other contexts.

So, what are the clouds being used for?

- Events: conferences and workshops

- Discussion: flash debates, hot topic that are people interested in in debating

- Eliciting expertise and open reviews

- Aggregating resources

As an example of a cloud being used for events or workshops, you can have a look at the cloud made for the fieldtrip. I like the way these sites are being set up. You might want to compare the concept with a wiki, in a sense that it is easy to start a topic and add your content. Yet, clouds have added value in their social approach around this content. You can discuss the content, add stuff or activities to it. The link section suggests that it is also a way to organize content. That is the part that i love the most. I truly believe that knowledge is always embedded in its social context. People that are familiar with the subject know what content is of value for it. For the visitor this information now presented in its context. I wonder how the content management is being handled, is there one big repository?

For this example of the cloud being used for announcing and discussing events, i would have expected some sort of “i attend” functionality so you can see who is going to be there.

A use of clouds that has become very popular according to Grainne, are the so called “flash debates” (see example). This is the use of a cloud for discussing a topic. Looks real similar to a discussion board or blog posting to me. But i guess the difference is that clouds are sort of part of the network, its centralized and the cloud is presented as a social object within the network. This brings me to a great quote from Jyri Engeström, which was presented as the theoretical background for the design of the site.

“Social networking makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people (Engeström, 2005)”

So, concluding, the Cloudworks initiative looks real interesting. I can see its possibilities for use in organizations for sharing, discussing and finding ideas and content in a general (KM) perspective. At Stoas, we have done something similar using Sakai and its sites. We use it for projects and to discuss specific topics. From first sight the cloudworks seem to make more specific use of web 2.0 services like eg Twitter and all is presented from a social networking perspective. I would love to experience the actual use of cloudworks for facilitating CoP’s and the flow of knowledge in organizations. I wonder if the technology will become available as open source software, this will make it possible to add designs to the system and to install it behind firewalls (still a big thing for corporate organizations).

Cloudworks Virtual Fieldtrip

View more presentations from grainne.

Horse assisted coaching

Published
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Joost Robben
on November 4, 2009
in Uncategorized
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This week I’ve participated in a horse assisted coaching session. In this session, the horse is used as reflectional instrument. This experience was absolutely breathtaking for me. Horses are just so pure and they reflect the participant’s (unconscious) behavior in a way that cannot be denied.

So how does this work?

In their natural environment, horses live in herds and their survival depends on the actions of its leaders. Therefore, horses naturally rely on the most authentic leaders in the group and their behavior always serves the group as a whole. When working with horses in a coaching situation, the horse tries to connect with the particpant and form a group as if were a heard. If the horse experiences inconsistencies in the participants (un)counscios behavior, it will immediately show this and respond to it.

I’ve experienced this coaching session as deeply moving, intimate and sincere. It has pointed me towards qualities and competencies of myself that i’ve not discovered or recognized so far. I suspect to be remembering about this for a very long time.

More information: website Ruud Knaapen

Open access gains more attention

Published
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Joost Robben
on October 30, 2009
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This week, the NWO (the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Researched), reported that they are going to actively promote open access of scientific publications. They want all publications to be available for all public via the internet.

Open access

One of the arguments for this is that science on universities in Holland is funded with government support and therefore its results belong to the public.

On her weblog, Marie-José Klaver, comments on this great step towards total open access. She mentions a study by John Houghton on the costs and benefits of research. In this study its claimed that open access could gain society up to 37-133 million euro’s per year! Thats some great news, but i wonder how publishers will respond to this movement. How should they adjust their strategies?

In today’s edition of dutch paper NRC-next, some prominent Dutch researchers respond enthusiastic to the call up from the NWO for more open access. They said to publish their articles in open acces journals. Which is great news, as prominent researchers publish in these journals, its status will grow and young researchers will be more likely to publish in open journals too.

Some of the open access databases I know of and use often:

http://www.doaj.org
http://dspace.ou.nl/

What are your favorites?

[picture source]

Leadership in a cartoon

Published
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Joost Robben
on October 22, 2009
in Uncategorized
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Yesterday i saw this great cartoon on TV in a documentary on the role of humor in communist Russia.

We are looking at four different leaders, sitting in the train. When the train stops, they are facing the same problem but come with 4 different solutions.

I think it shows us in a stricking way the characteristics of these specific leaders, a great way to learn I would say! Also, a great movie to show during workshops about leadership. What you think?

Enjoy watching.

This site is eLearning Learning featured!!

Published
by
Joost Robben
on July 9, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

eLearning LearningeLearning Learning is a great communitysite that strives to collect the best information on the web about e-Learning. The community is engaged/ started by Tony Karrer. From now on this weblog is also featured by eLearning Learning!

I’m very honored to be part of the community and hope to expand the reach of this blog and connect with many interesting people through the community.

Be sure to check out the community site and see all the great posts that are selected there based on social signals.

Social Learning at Sun

Published
by
Joost Robben
on June 5, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

Via a tweet by @trishuhl I came upon a nice case study from Bersin & Associates on social learning at Sun Microsystems. It is a description of the “Sun Learning eXchange“. This is a sort of Youtube site which Sun employees can use to exchange content.

What I like about the project/ the case study is that it started from a real world business/ learning problem instead of just mere looking how to use popular webtools.

The first business problem lies within the cut back in budget for the Sun learning department (SLS). As a result of that they couldn’t provide the training hours needed to meet the training needs of the sales people.

Secondly, sales people needed to have access to the right tools and information needed to close their deals in the field.

Analysis found that 90% of the Sun sales people prefer to get their information through what they call TOI, transfer of information. It is described as a “technology-industry practice of informal product demonstrations and data sharing” (ie. informal learning??). The sales team wanted to be able to access this info right in the field, the solution had thus to work on mobile devices.

Social networking with the ability to exchange content was seen as a good solution for the sales people to learn. The report mentions a valuable lesson regarding the implementation of an online social networking service:

“While widespread adoption is best achieved through bottom-up viral marketing, corporate social networks cannot become embedded into the long-term
cultural fabric of the organization without visible executive participation and sponsorship.”

I must say that I find this one of the most difficult aspects of actually implementing informal learning like the use of social networking. By designing and implementing it for a reason, we are in a sense making it formal again. The bottom-up emergence of the use of social tools by early adopters has, at some point, got to get a more organizational approach. The active participation of the “hubs” in the network, influential people like managers, is of the most importance to its success to become widely used and to meet the intended business goals. I question myself, when do u do this (if necessary at all) and is perhaps regulation and procedures needed as well? Do we need, at some point, to make it mandatory to publish content to such a site?