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Margaret Kubicek looks at how organisations can encourage their people to pool ideas and information.
Organisations are good at assessing the training needs of their employees, but too often neglect the skills people already possess that could be shared with colleagues.
This belief prompted people management consultancy learnpurple to incorporate a knowledge-sharing element into talent toolbox, its online review and appraisal service, says learnpurple's managing director, Jane Sunley.
"It's not as though they're asked, then made to share, they are asked what they would like to share," says Sunley. "People actually like to teach others on the whole, but don"t like to be made to do it."
Contract catering business BaxterSmith introduced talent toolbox about a year ago. It employs 600 people across 36 sites and each now has a training plan that fits in with the company"s overall training plan, says managing director Mike Smith. "It's an opportunity for those being appraised to say how they could assist with the development and training of others in the organisation," he said.
Central to BaxterSmith's training plan is a "who-can-develop-whom" ethos, exemplified in an initiative that sprang from talent toolbox: the chefs' forum. The company's 16 senior chefs hold meetings every other month where they share everything from purchasing and supply information to the latest menu and recipe ideas. "No managers or directors sit in on that forum," says Smith. "The chefs feel they have a voice in our company."
This bottom-up approach engenders a sense of empowerment among employees, and keeps regional managers from getting 'bogged down' in T&D needs across multiple sites, says Smith. The forum has now gained its own momentum, with chefs coming up with their own development ideas.
While knowledge-sharing initiatives have obvious benefits, training managers often face big challenges in keeping them active.
Bayer Pharmaceuticals ran an online discussion forum last year following implementation of a global targeting process in sales. It aimed to identify and share any common learning taking place across five countries to support the new process. Bayer is now putting together a best practice guide for targeting - a positive result despite a huge amount of effort, says training manager Claire Hutchins.
"The process is quite hard in an organisation unused to any kind of chatrooms or forums," says Hutchins. "I think it can be hard to sell the benefits of participating in a forum over and above e-mail." She pitched the project as an opportunity to learn new technology and learn from peers. "We made sure their bosses knew they were participating," she adds, noting the importance of even small rewards for participation.
Upfront preparation
The forum was active for three weeks, a new question being posted each week with set deadlines for people to respond. Participants all knew each other, but they still weren't always forthcoming in posting their responses. "Because of its asynchronous nature, people tend to hold back and think someone else will go first."
An online discussion forum requires about the same amount of upfront preparation time as a face-to-face session, says Hutchins, but managers need to allow more time for clarification throughout, as well as simply phoning and e-mailing participants to remind them to take part.
"It's completely new and some people probably struggle to see its added value. That's not to say people aren't willing and happy to take part, but once they're into it, they may feel shy about asking or clarifying what you want of them," says Hutchins. "Either they don't respond at all, or don't respond to their full potential. Or they may hold back because they don't want to respond first, then mirror their response to whoever went first."
For any kind of online learning initiatives to succeed, their managers should be prepared to "drip feed them all the time," says Andrew Ettinger, director of learning resources at business school Ashridge. "There's an inherent tension between wanting it to be completely free and making it very tight and focused and almost editing the flow because people can get turned off by a hundred different ideas flying all over the place."
Another factor concerns the culture of the organisation. Some take to technology like ducks to water, but it can be much harder for others, says Ettinger, who believes many senior managers still struggle with anything beyond basic e-mail.
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