Learning 2.0 -- Full Text

A New Focus on the Workforce
A number of pervasive market place, economic and competitive trends are converging today in such a way as to intensify every organization’s focus on the performance of its workforce. As part of its ongoing research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses around the world, Accenture regularly surveys senior executives on issues related to the workforce. The most recent edition of the Accenture High-Performance Workforce Study—an exclusive and comprehensive survey of senior executives in multiple countries—demonstrates a strong correlation between an organization’s achievement of high performance and the priority it places on human capital development.

The research also shows that many organizations are dissatisfied with the manner in which they prepare their workers for today’s marketplace challenges. Only 14 percent of respondents in the Accenture High-Performance Workforce Study described the overall skill level of their organization's entire workforce as industry leading. Organizations struggle to close the gap between their top performers and lower performers, as well as decrease the time it takes new employees to reach competency and excel at their jobs.

Improving these numbers will be challenging in the coming years due to a variety of factors. In many industries, the pace of innovation and technological change strains the ability of customer-facing workers to keep up. Organizations in many parts of the world are expecting workforce shortages caused by the impending retirement of large numbers of those born in the post-World War II generation. This exodus of talent, and the resulting competition for scarce talent to replace retiring workers, could dramatically affect organizational effectiveness.

Organizations unable to transform their human capital capabilities and respond to economic pressures to become more efficient are likely to fall behind the competition. Fortunately, a number of new processes, technologies and change management strategies have emerged recently that organizations can leverage to close the performance gap.

Training Workers versus Supporting Performance
The performance of a particular employee depends on a number of factors: their aptitude, motivation, skills and knowledge. Employers have different levers they can pull to improve each of these factors. Traditionally, HR functions have used the recognition and rewards lever to hire and retain the people with the greatest aptitude and the training lever to equip their people with the skills and knowledge required for their jobs.

The problem with traditional training and eLearning is that employees learn at most 20 percent of what they need to do their jobs through formal training. Most learning happens informally, on the job. Historically, an organization’s learning function does not view on-the-job learning as part of their domain.

Learning functions generally do not take a significant role in providing the knowledge employees need to perform at a higher level. Organizations have traditionally tried to train this knowledge into their employees. However, research shows this approach is only marginally effective if the knowledge is not applied immediately.

Learning 2.0 extends traditional training to include the levers of on-the-job learning and knowledge management to significantly boost employee performance. Facilitating and accelerating the 80 percent of learning that occurs on the job can result in a tremendous payoff. A commensurate benefit can also be gained by providing tools to find and acquire knowledge at the point of need, instead of trying to directly train people on knowledge. Traditional training can be reserved for areas where it is best suited—such as new hire orientation, awareness building, skills development and areas where strict compliance is required.

The learning department is a natural fit to own Learning 2.0, not through its traditional role of creating training, but rather through a new role of facilitating the sharing and collaboration that drives on-the-job learning and enables point of- need knowledge acquisition. In many cases, funding of this new role can come from repurposing a portion.

Today’s Average Performance
of the current training budget for areas where a Learning 2.0 approach would better achieve business objectives. A Learning 2.0 approach generally reduces costs significantly by leveraging free content developed by employees, rather than paying for formal course development.

Some of the specific ways that learning functions can expand their traditional training to provide Learning 2.0 capabilities are:

Web 2.0 Learning. Provide a YouTube-like capability for employees to share their skills and knowledge via videos, podcasts, slide shows, conference calls, events, etc.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management. Enable people to connect and collaborate within and outside the organization.

Performance Workspace. Provide a comprehensive place for key workforces to go for all their knowledge, process, application, collaboration and learning needs.

Web 2.0 Learning
The initial wave of organizations moving from classroom training to eLearning drove a significant amount of cost savings, mainly from reduced travel costs. While formal eLearning courses and Learning Management Systems will continue to play an important role, they have raised new challenges:

• The cost to develop and maintain eLearning courses.
  
  
• The effort to incorporate front line feedback and keep content current and relevant.
  
  
• The challenge to retain the learning until the learning is applied.
  
  
• New demands for bite-sized learning nuggets delivered at the point of need and consumable via the user’s preferred device.

Web 2.0 Learning uses Web 2.0 technologies to deliver just-in-time, point-of-need, bite-sized learning. This learning can be delivered through the user’s device of choice, such as a PC, smart phone or MP3 player. Web 2.0 Learning leverages free content developed directly by experts and users instead of requiring lengthy and costly course development cycles. Think of marrying YouTube with Facebook and apply it to the learning needs of your key workforces.

A living example of this is Microsoft’s Sales Academy. The Sales Academy helps Microsoft’s sales force find the content they need to quickly get up to speed on a particular product so they can apply it to an immediate customer opportunity. It also helps them learn what actually works in the field from other sales people.

Product experts and sales people contribute content. Content is also harvested from conference calls, presentations and third party vendors. While a small staff helps turn content into vidcasts and podcasts, the content is basically free. With no lengthy course development cycles, content gets to the field faster while it is most relevant.

Microsoft has an internal user base of 22,000 for the Academy and has opened it up to 5,000 partners in its distribution network. This user base generates more than 200 podcasts per month, which have significantly increased their sales force’s knowledge around products, competitors and sales best practices. It also gives the field a communication channel for immediate feedback to sales, product and learning leadership.

Microsoft implemented the Microsoft Sales Academy using its new Podcasting Kit for SharePoint running on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Microsoft has made this software available to other companies to implement their own version of Microsoft’s Sales Academy, with cataloging of vidcasts/podcasts, searching, user contributions, user ratings and other functionality.

Another example is Capital One. With more than 20,000 employees worldwide, Capital One distributes iPods as standard equipment to employees enrolled in training courses. According to Capital One’s chief learning officer, Ted Forbes, iPods are viewed as just another productivity tool, similar to laptops and personal digital assistants, allowing employees to work and learn remotely. Forbes magazine points to the statistic that more than 90 million Americans drive alone to work every day—listening to music, news, talk radio or perhaps a book on tape. Now, however, with learning delivered over iPods, Zunes and other types of MP3 players, commuters can advance their careers while driving to work. The ubiquity of MP3 players will enable personal broadcasting (podcasting and vidcasting) to become a reality, allowing broadband content to be ported to MP3 players and mobile phones.

Enabling Collaboration and Knowledge Management Within and Outside the Organization
Organizations are increasingly discovering that the traditional approach to enterprise learning—directed from “on high,“ as it were—is not nimble enough to keep up with rapidly changing workforce needs. By the time a traditional course is designed, created and rolled out, the need it was supposed to address may have changed—or, worse, a competitor may have already seized the high ground.

Another trend, however, is to move more of the responsibility for learning to the workforce itself. That is, high performers across industries know that knowledge sharing and collaboration are not activities that are separate from enterprise learning but are, in fact, aspects of a new definition of learning. Learning is increasingly occurring through interaction with peers and by applying on-the-job experiences. Learning is no longer linear but multi-threaded.

Underlying these changes in the definition of learning is the introduction of new ways to communicate and collaborate across the workforce. Social computing, the application of computer technology to facilitate collaboration, has been around for decades. But recent technology developments have dramatically enriched collaborative capabilities. There has also been an explosive emergence of online communities that exist primarily to share information. Consider the enormous success of consumer websites:

• YouTube (www.youtube.com), the online community for sharing videos is enormously popular not just for sharing home movies, but also for influencing the 2008 US presidential campaign.
  
  
• Flickr (www.flickr.com), the online community for sharing photographs.
  
  
• Facebook (www.facebook.com), which in a short amount of time has become one of the most popular social networking sites and now is generating major traffic on the Web.
  
  
• LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which allows users to leverage the power of social networks to find jobs, get introductions to potential customers or just connect with someone they have lost touch with.
  
  
• Second Life (www.secondlife.com), a 3D virtual world built completely by its residents, now boasts a user base of 12 million and provides social networking and collaboration opportunities for its users.

Social networking is beginning to transfer from the world at large into the world of enterprise learning. Learners will increasingly expect to be able to learn, share knowledge and work together as easily and effortlessly as they can share photos or find a new restaurant.

These tools are beginning to become mainstream, as is evidenced by software providers like Microsoft incorporating blog, wiki, podcasting, expertise finders and social networking components into their enterprise software offerings like SharePoint and Microsoft Office. While organizations now have the robust tools they need, they need to apply them in a way that provides effective support for their employees to achieve high performance. How you approach collaboration must be tailored to the way your employees work. The approach varies depending on whether you are collaborating on a specific project, collaborating with others in a community of practice or collaborating across a business process.

Accenture Performance Workspace: Supporting Real-Time Performance Needs
The rapid pace of technology and business change puts intense pressure on workers, especially those in customer facing roles who must consume and absorb an increasingly large volume of ever-changing information. This pressure is doubly hard on new hires who find it difficult to reach acceptable levels of competence in their roles fast enough to help a company stay on top. Organizations must find better ways to support knowledge workers—both experienced workers and new hires—with the information, knowledge, access to continuous learning and collaboration that they need to succeed. To deliver these capabilities, Accenture has developed an innovative solution called the Accenture Performance Workspace.

Tailored to the particular needs of an organization, this comprehensive type of solution delivers a workforce-centric, role-based desktop environment comprised of the knowledge, content, legacy applications, productivity tools, learning, collaboration and expert network capabilities that enable workers to increase their performance to new levels. Industry analysts such as Gartner suggest that organizations that successfully implement these sorts of tools will lay the foundation for maximizing their long-term competitiveness during the next decade.

One organization that has implemented such a real-time Learning 2.0 solution is BT Retail, the UK-based telecommunications firm providing end-to-end communications services for 21 million customers. In less than five months, Accenture helped BT Retail implement a Performance Workspace that integrates learning, knowledge, collaboration, performance management and simulation on the desktop of its customer service agents. The results: improved customer satisfaction, cost savings from improved call-handling efficiencies, and a 23 percent increase in agents' confidence in their ability to perform well.

The Performance Workspace of the future will seamlessly provide self-service learning targeted to specific workforces, allowing employees to work, learn, collaborate and access experts whenever and wherever they are working.

How Enterprise Learning Will Move to Learning 2.0
The business payoff of world-class enterprise learning is clear. Accenture’s extensive research into High Performance Businesses has found that one of the three essential building blocks to high performance includes the development of people who enable the business to achieve extraordinary levels of employee productivity. In this way, companies create a “talent multiplier”, achieving superior business results versus their industry peers per dollar of investment in their workforces.

To be successful, this new Learning 2.0 environment needs to be:

Accessible across multiple channels, allowing for learner centric distribution modes including instructor-led training, e-learning, podcasts, wikis, blogs and so forth.

Flexible, to allow for content re-use, allowing for multipurpose learning assets available online, in the classroom and in audio/video format.

Modular, to enable learners to find and consume just the portion of the content that is relevant to them and to the task at hand.

Dynamic, allowing learning objects to be updated by subject matter experts in the field as key content changes.

Collaborative, so learners can easily contribute content, share lessons learned and add to both their personal and the organizational knowledge base.

Engaging, such that learners want to participate in consuming and creating content because it holds their attention and interest and they are recognized for their participation.

Personalized, meaning that learning experiences are relevant to an employee’s role and work context and are delivered at the point of need.

Measured, so that the impact of learning on the learner’s job performance is tracked and so that learners can be more accountable for contributing and consuming knowledge capital related to their jobs and their organization.

User-generated, meaning that more content will be provided by users, increasing the relevance of learning to actual performance needs and driving down overall training costs.

Corporate learning is truly a key talent multiplier. It can deliver rapid business results that support growth: improvements in customer retention and satisfaction; increased speed to market of new products; improved productivity of strategic workforces such as IT, sales and customer call center operators; and decreased turnover of high-potential managers. Just as importantly, it can help an organization prepare itself for future challenges, continuously adapt and drive innovation and growth.

For more information on how Accenture can help your organization achieve high performance through advanced learning and workforce transformation solutions, please call Accenture at +1 312 693 5900 and reference “Learning 2.0.”

About the Author
Tom Hoglund is a director in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance consulting practice. With 25 years experience in the industry, he is a frequent speaker and consultant to numerous Fortune 500 companies on the topics of portals, content management, collaboration, knowledge management and learning. Tom’s solutions have been rolled out to millions of end users and have won numerous awards.