Social learning is alive and well. Especially in the informal sense but formal social still needs encouragement.
I made this realization at SwoopChat today (a Swoop Analytics users event) where I was delighted by the numerous internal comms people I met and listened to. I learned that many were thinking beyond social tech adoption (even though it remains a challenge and I have thoughts on why in a follow-up post) and more on encouraging and creating space for meaningful conversations or as my friend and colleague James Tyer likes to say, “purposeful conversations about work”.
I reminded the group that conversation is a vehicle not the cargo, although little of this learning “cargo” can be traced back directly to performance improvement. Knowledge sharing is definitely top of mind for Internal Comms and Swoop Analytics helps present that data very clearly. So if L&D isn’t going to lead the charge here, as that ship has sailed, the opportunity now is in helping L&D be partners and/or learn how to better leverage social to improve their formal offerings.
Some obvious examples of formal social would be coaching and mentoring programs, point of work performance support following training events and a qualitative feedback loop to gather insights on training effectiveness and application. Formal social, as these things would qualify as, are of great value and could be even greater when extended through social technology. Informal Social however; the collaboration, the sharing and the community may be best left supported and encouraged by those much deeper in the day-to-day of communication.
