thelearningcrowd

Is your lunch hour company time or your own? Apparently, 96% of participants in a recent CARA survey say informal learning should happen on company time (only 4% said it should occur on their own time). Yet the most useful informal learning approach was “lunch and learn”.

This is just one of numerous interesting results from a CARA pulse survey of 125 businesses across a range of industries in the US. The survey looked at attitudes to social media as an enabler of informal learning at work.

According to the survey:

• 82% use social media to advance their own professional skills and resources
• 81% believe social media offer valuable learning opportunities
• 98% think social media are changing how they learn and access information

However, businesses worry about:

• Time-wasting and loss of productivity
• Network access and security
• Knowing which sources/recognised experts are legitimate and trustworthy

Restricting social media access will have little impact on productivity of disengaged staff. They’ll find other ways to waste time or just use the smartphone in their pocket rather than the corporate PC and network.

Keeping an organisation’s network secure is clearly vital. Allowing access to the social media platforms and their associated apps can compromise network security. As a government CIO said recently, tongue-in-cheek, when asked to define social media “That’s the stuff I block”. Such blanket bans are the easy solution to maintain security. They are also one of the reasons Gartner consultant Andrea Di Maio thinks Gov 2.0 initiatives are failing. They prevent employees from sharing knowledge with colleagues, engaging clients and stakeholders and learning from others.

In many organisations it is left to IT departments alone to make this security vs. access decision, case by case. The security issues are easily quantified, the business benefit for each individual website is less so. Benefit really comes from the collective use of a range of web resources over time. Determining the balance point between security and openness is a strategic decision for the organisation as a whole, not just the CIO.

Knowing who or what sources to trust is an ongoing issue. Social media bring this into sharp focus because “people trust their networks”. Traditionally experts are identified and defined by their industry/discipline/profession as a whole. Social media allow me to choose who I follow or rate and I will be significantly influenced by my online networks. As the CARA report says:

“Without the filter of the employer or the industry determining who is a true expert and which information is accurate, informal learning via social media gives credence to a much broader scope of resources and information”.

Using social media this way is a direct challenge to expertise, who defines it and how.

Picking up on their own findings, one of CARA’s suggested strategies for enhancing informal learning is to introduce social media approaches like webcasts as part of “lunch and learn” sessions. Maybe the first topic, on organisational culture to support informal learning, could be “who’s lunch hour is it anyway?”

Government communications is radically changing, as shown by the COI review and shift to digital channels. Job roles are changing in response and staff will need to pick up new skills quickly and effectively. None more so than in digital comms.

So what are the key specialist skills for digital communications in government? Can we define them in a way that easily supports skills development for individuals and teams? What digital/social media skills can be made “mainstream” and what really are specialist capabilities?

What’s in and what’s out of digital comms is notoriously difficult to define. One reason is mission creep. Where does digital comms stop and general business and leadership acumen start? It was hard enough when there was only a website to worry about. Now we also have the proliferation of digital channels, public and employee expectations about social media and an incessant demand to transform public service delivery.

A good example is website convergence (the Ministry of Justice is reducing about 160 sites to around 10). Digital teams find themselves dealing with more than just content management and rationalisation, complex as that is. They are also drawn into IT infrastructure, stakeholder management, service contract re-negotiation and much more. Convergence can also get caught up in branding, organisation independence and other issues needing deft diplomacy rather than digital technology.

This highlights another issue, disentangling the specific digital skill (e.g. writing for web usability/accessibility) from the “common to all communicators” skill (e.g. writing clearly in plain English). Also, skills need a foundation in knowledge and behaviour. Of course, web convergence needs good editing skills. It also needs specialist and general business knowledge. All supported by key behaviours such as building relationships with stakeholders in the organisations whose websites are being targeted.

So, where to start on defining digital skills?

There is an existing GCN Core Skills Framework for Professional Communicators. However, written for a different time and comms context, it only mentions digital skills a few times in areas such as “channels and technology”. There is also some notable external “prior art”.  Steph Gray proposed an overview of government digital disciplines, nicely visualised in a Venn diagram. The Society of IT Managers (SOCITM) also did some work last year on defining skills for web professionals. This was intended as an explicit extension of the well-known SFIA framework. Unfortunately, this still seems to be stuck at the draft proposal stage.

Combined with some digital skills audits this provided enough to get some discussions and workshops started, involving digital comms specialist from across government. That generated a lot of flipchart lists and Post-it mark-ups. It also showed some big differences in apparently similar roles and functions, prompting an explicit split between:

• Skills (what I need to do)
• Knowledge (what I need to know) and
• Behaviour (how I need to do it)

For five different levels of experience from entry level Information Officer (IO) up to Senior Civil Servant (SCS). Additionally, thinking about the current and future trends Robin Riley highlighted the following key themes:

• Managing excellent websites (SEO, user journey, hosting, site analytics, site design, IA, accessibility, branding, archiving etc.)
• Managing digital content (editing, writing, curating content across multiple sites, designing and commissioning interactive products etc.)
• Exploiting Data (open data, transparency, apps, APIs, data protection, copyright etc.)
• Engaging Digital Communities (social media, community management, e-consultations, live events etc.)
• Gaining insight through digital (user analytics, customer behaviours, web trends, reputation tracking, early warning etc.)
• Supporting communications through digital (digital component of campaigns, digital internal comms, digital media monitoring and response, online news etc.
• Enabling the digital business (transactional services, driving digital default, collaboration tools, technology watch, internal social media, staff social media guidelines, etc.)

Taking these together provided a matrix of experience level against skills, knowledge and behaviour in each of the themes.

Filling out each matrix with lists from the workshops highlighted some key gaps. The majority of skills identified were in just three theme areas: managing websites, managing content and supporting communications. While they will remain important, it’s likely the future focus will be on the other areas. Exploiting data, engaging communities, gaining insight and digitally enabling government business will be key areas for individuals and digital teams to develop their skills, knowledge and behaviours. 

The next step is to get wider direct involvement from the digital community to both “fill in the blanks” in the matrices and check completeness/validity. The new Buddypress-powered GCN community site provides some useful collaboration and crowd-sourcing support for this.

Of course, the acid test will be how helpful this framework is for identifying development needs, creating specific role profiles, etc. Watch this space.

This article is also published as a guest post on Neil William’s Mission Creep blog

Challenged to concisely define “social media”, a CIO in the audience jokingly replied “Social Media? The stuff I block!”. The best line of the night from an interesting discussion at the BCS London branch under the banner, Are you social or anti-social?

All three panelists provided interesting examples of social media in the workplace and its potential impacts, both good and not so good.

Jemima Gibbons (@jemimag) illustrated the power (and perils) of grassroots led efforts with Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. Set up by two employees for the princely sum of $100 it become an incredibly vibrant employee community credited with significantly improving staff retention. Everything was fine until the company decided a “proper” system was required. Unfortunately this was perceived as too hard to use and overly moderated. It was quickly deserted. Another example was Luis Suarez at IBM. As Jemima said, he greatly benefited from IBM’s need to have public social media champions. However, his work still demonstrates that social and collaborative tools can provide great flexibility in how and where employees work while maintaining high productivity and quality.

Joanne Jacobs (@joannejacobs) took on some key questions on the corporate uptake of social media. Is it a fad? No, it’s not going away. People enjoy being able access what information they need, when and in the format they want.  Gartner predicts that by 2014, “over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology“. Social media is here to stay. This chimes with  An Optimists Tour of the Future, in which Mark Stevenson takes the position that change is going to happen, the question is do you want to influence it?

Joanne’s view on the qualities of a social media strategist included:

• experience designing and delivering training
• expertise in marketing and real strategic planning (Porter’s 5 forces, etc.)
• can write a comprehensive business plan and understand financial statements
• uses the technology and understands how it works
• has specific experience matching the organisational need (e.g. sales, organisational development, etc.)

Finally LJ Rich (@ljrich) looked at how companies and communities have responded when social media “goes wrong”. Drawing on examples such as #Ciscofatty and the response to the Daily Mail’s article on Sarah Baskerville. Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tells him, “With great power comes great responsibility”.  LJ echoed this “With more powerful tools comes more ways to be mis-interpreted”.  Given the compressed and dis-associated nature of 140 character tweets, responding to percieved slights needs to be done with empathy.

The panel discussion focused on issues of security and potential loss of productivity. This mirrors the main blocks to the corporate uptake of social media found by the CARA survey, Social Media’s Impact on Informal Workplace Learning.  Fears that access to new technology will distract employees from “real work” are nothing new (same was said about mobile phones, Web 1.0, e-mail, and probably fax machines). The rapid adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices simply means that if they wish, employees can “waste time” on social media regardless of access through their work PC. It’s a corporate culture/line management/employee engagement issue rather than a social media technology one.

It seems many organisations currently support last night’s CIO, unfortunately as a directive rather than a joke.