It is of ultimate value for the business to not just allow, but also to explicitly foster and facilitate knowledge sharing of their frontline staff in combination with providing meaningful top-down knowledge. It is a treasure waiting to be unearthed:
"Front-line workers can contribute to a company’s body of knowledge by capturing and sharing what they see on a daily basis through photos and videos. These images and the context within them are an oft-missing component of innovation and growth." (Carrie Basham Marshall)
“A quiet revolution has been happening in our digital workplaces over the last few years: employees who were never digitally connected in the past have been brought online through a combination of BYOD policies. All of this creates a fantastic opportunity for businesses to engage workers in a way that previously had been thwarted by basic technology blockers.”
Nice analysis on why Chernobyl's catastrophic meltdown REALLY happened and what can be learnt when it comes to providing knowledge & information at the workplace:
"The quality of your decisions is based on the quality of your information, supported by a good process to make decisions. Often we find that people setting policy are not the people doing the actual work, and this causes breakdowns between work-as-expected and work-as-done..."
What to do about it?
"Try to encourage sharing of high quality information as frequently and liberally as possible."
And ask the question:
"How can you move authority to where the information is richest, the context most current, and the employees closest to customers or the situation at hand?
Highly recommended read.
"Today, workers from the factory floor to retail staff confront new and unexpected situations that require new approaches that are not covered in the process manual or training materials. These should be seen as an opportunity for workers to learn by assessing the situation, improvising new approaches and then reflecting on the impact achieved." (by John Hagel).
We should really start taking the needs of frontline workers more seriously. Not only because they require different approaches to "learning" at their workplaces but because ultimately this will prove to be a massive boon for the companies because these are the people at the forefront of value creation for their businesses.
“Learning is driven by the community of people who actually do the daily work. It is generated by the requirements of the work, rather than determined by abstract standards of what people ought to know.” Help the people help themselves...
„It quite often happens that people who work in Learning (Education) start to take an interest in learning – and come to the realization that almost everything in Learning is terribly ineffective when considered from the standpoint of learning.“ A highly refreshing read from Nick Shackleton-Jones. Again.
“The demand for learning in the flow of work should not be interpreted as a desire for learning tools nudging at the attention of workers as they try and achieve their goals…what workers are after is intuitive problem solving as part of their work.” (by Myles Runham)
Stop focusing on the learning part, start paying attention to the working part. Learning is the work.
This is a real problem and especially prevalent in the jobs of deskless workers: “Whatever learning needs to happen for getting work done at the front line -- on production floors, in sales, or in customer service -- often is not generated, or even recognized as needed, by the training organizations.”
A really wonderful article about several ideas which, retroactively, explain the thought processes and underlying ideas of loop.
“Most of your organization’s HOWs […] are locked in the minds of your employees. You NEED them to share so you can remain agile and maximize your company’s long-term potential.”
Highly valuable thoughts by JD Dillon about sharing workplace knowledge.
Important thoughts by Rohit Agarwal from Copperberg about making field service technicians involved into success strategy: “Technician insights is a two way street enabled by actively listening and implementing the ideas.” Think workforce first!
All too often this happens: a collaboration platform, an enterprise social network, a learning experience platform, etc. with grandiose visions of transparency, cross-company collaboration and knowledge sharing are implemented at organizations. After the initial excitement though they end up with a barren wasteland where you hear the tumbleweed passing by.
Certainly, the people are to blame, because they are not willing to share their knowledge, right? Or the companies’ culture does not fit the notion of sharing. Or using these platforms are not tightened in the people’s OKRs. Or... what have you.
Well, not so fast. While the above is fair and square I am convinced that there is a deeper root cause, as indicated in the article shared below: You only reach meaningful interaction between people (which is a necessary condition for collaboration) by acknowledging that there is a reverse correlation between team size and the amount of targeted interactions. So maybe, the next time a new collaboration platform is being tried to push to an organization, try starting at the team level first and scale up from there. Think big, but always start small!
“All of our learning is connected. Skills are not developed in isolation to the rest of our life. Professionals learn mostly from their daily work and their team members” (Harold Jarche) ... yet those in charge in organizations don’t see the implications and/or are still convinced that certainly „their employees don’t share knowledge“, reflecting their legacy and incredibly dated world view of control and compliance.
„Learning used to be about transferring knowledge, that is no longer the case... The trend is towards making this knowledge available in the context of the work, in order to improve performance.“
Yepp... Modern workplace learning has to focus on helping people create new knowledge instead of pushing them to consume more content. If done right, true (!) learning will be a by-product, a consequence.
It was a absolute pleasure hosting our webinar with Paul Jocelyn about learning culture. In a little follow-up interview we discuss the changes taking place within Learning & Development.
We had the pleasure to have a short conversation with Paul Jocelyn about Learning Culture. Check out the recording…
That’s what I call a great case to use IoT data to provide contextual information for Field Service Enginees by OTIS Elevators: „when a service or repair is required, engineers are able to arrive on site with all the information and parts necessary to complete the job.” BTW: we are working on this so not only large companies with lot’s of resources can tap on the potential of IoT.
Spot the mistake: This article states importance of „learning“ in our job lives. Then: “If your company doesn’t have an L&D team, you can still take advantage by finding online courses and resources that cater to businesses or individuals.” It seems to deeply ingrained in everybody’s heads that “learning” necessarily equals “content”. A pity…