So what does this mean for you in HR and talent management?
Read the full article here >

That’s our take … what’s yours? We want to hear from you – especially if you are a member of Gen X or a Millennial. Send us your comments, and we will continue the dialogue.

• Internet Footprint Driving Away Employers?
  Social Intelligence Corp. scours one’s public online activity from the past seven years and reports it to prospective employers. Its CEO Max Drucker explains what specific data the company looks for, how often monitoring occurs, and what this means in terms of privacy concerns. Also joining the conversation is Electronic Privacy Information Center Senior Counsel John Verdi. Listen and Read

  Does YOUR organization check out potential employees’ backgrounds before hiring? What criteria do in include or exclude in that digital footprint search? Have you ever had your own digital footprint evaluated … what did you discover is out there?

• In Job Market, Are Gen Y’s Wants Out Of Reach?
  Over 40 million Americans are in their 20s, and they’re having a particularly tough time securing work. Their expectations may not match what their employers have to offer. Ryan Healy talks more about young job seekers’ challenges. He is the co-founder of a website aimed at helping young professionals network and share ideas. Listen and Read

  Do you find a gap between Millennials expectations of their work and your/the organization’s expectations of their work? What similarities and differences do you experience between your style of learning, communicating and working and that of your Millennial colleagues? Is your organization formally working on ways to attract, integrate and leverage Millennial workers?

Please share your responses below to these questions about social media and Millennial workers. If you are looking to engage these questions in your organization, Future Workplace offers keynote presentations, in-depth workshops and facilitated dialogues about these topics and more. Learn more about these topics and find out what leading organizations are doing now to address these challenges in The 2020 Workplace book by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd.

Or should you and your team be banned from access on a company network?

Gartner analysts Anthony Bradley and Nikos Drakos say corporations should not ban social applications such as Facebook, Twitter or social networks in the enterprise.

Their arguments come after a number of financial service companies in the financial services sector have stopped their employees from using such tools at work.

While the number of ways to collaborate with peers online is on the increase from using Microsoft SharePoint to joining online communities of practice, most of this increase can be traced to collaboration tools behind a company’s firewall.

But with Facebook claiming they have more than 90 million plus users online, should employees be able to access their Facebook profile or other online profile from their work computer?

Garnter argues YES and the way to do this according to Garnter anslysts, Anthony Bradley and Nikos Drakos is to create a “Trust Model,” meaning:

• define how to participate in these online social networks at work
• define the positive and negative ways to doing this
• present specific guidelines around such areas as expected online behavior, corporate policies on appropriate and ethical behavior and appropriate brand usage

So what are companies saying about all of this?

Here are the three barriers I hear to opening up these social networks at work. My question is this: how real are these barriers?

• Impact on Employee Productivity: Employees may spend so much time updating profiles their productivity will decrease. Yes, there are employees who will play games online but there are also employees who will seek out networks to improve their productivity—like joining a network on LinkedIn or Facebook related to their expertise.
• Impact on Company Network: Let’s say hundreds of employees are running virtual reality apps on Facebook or watching YouTube videos at the same time, are they sucking bandwidth from the company’s pipes?
• Impact on Company Brand: Employees that communicate online on their social networks need to be aware that their profiles on public social networking sites identify them as employees of a company, so their postings can have an impact on the company’s reputation and brand in the marketplace.

All this points to the importance of designing a “trust model” and set of guidelines before going forward. The bottom line I see is this:
Employees, especially Millennials, are living, communicating and networking online. They will bring a set of digital expectations to their employer and over time being able to access social networks from work will become important to the competitiveness of companies.

Think for a moment about what the world of work wil be like in 2020—won’t employees just assume they can access everything from their PDA/Smart phone—including, of course, learning?

Does your company allow you to access social networks from your work computer? Why or why not?

[tags]facebook, social networking, gartner, enterprise 2.0, new york times[/tags]

The graphic above is taken from the AFOL community, or Adult Fans of Lego. These adult fans make up 10% of Lego’s billion-dollar business. My advice: Chief Learning Officers should take a page from Chief Marketing Officers. Learn what drives success in these communities and as noted in the excellent book, Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, begin your journey to build a community by asking yourself key questions such as:

1. What business objectives are you trying to achieve?
2. What pain points/passions/areas of general interest do your community members need help with or want to give assistance to?
3. How will you support and maintain the community? Communities are cheap to launch but to be effective they must be constantly supported with new content, new features and new designs.
4. How will you measure success? Think beyond just the number of visitors and number of page views to business metrics such as increases in the engagement of employees and customers and decreases in costs.
5. What are the incentives? Community members need to be rewarded for their participation.

Now how do these lessons apply to an internal community that a learning & development department may launch? There is actually quite a bit of overlap – one can ask the same questions, the answers will differ for an internal community versus an external community, but the overall secrets to success are the same, namely:

• Start with a business objective
• Understand the passion of your potential community members
• Build into your budget the resources to support and maintain the community (think beyond technology resources to people and training resources)
• Set metrics early on to measure your success in business terms
• Be creative about providing rewards and incentives for participation – remember your employees contribute to a community in addition to the demands of their “day job”

What other “secrets of success” do you have in running and managing online communities of practice? Share them by either posting a comment or sending me an email.

[tags]Online communities; Groundswell, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Learning Officer[/tags]

We had a wide ranging discussion of how learning will change and evolve from a traditional function to one that is more integrated into the fabric of every employee’s life. Key themes that emerged include:

1. The team from Sun Microsystems kicked off the event with a major theme we discussed for the rest of our day and half. The trend, dubbed, “Learning 2.0″ is moving corporate learning from structured programs to collaborative learning experiences. This means top-down push learning is being replaced by self service “pull” learning with an overall goal of taking our General Motors production model for designing and delivering learning and shifting this to a Google-like search model.

Sun is determined to push its LMS system (currently the heart of its learning system) to the periphery of a new, strategic (and open source) tool that will allow flexible, web-enabled learning from anywhere, including mobile devices, and will encourage employees to contribute to course content creation.

2. Learning is becoming more social, informal, continuous and embedded in our daily activities. While the term “social learning” has gained a cult status, the ability to collectively create and collectively understand is becoming a mandatory skill for employees at all levels. In fact, credit Suisse shared their online virtual communities of practice model which connects employees to others in the organization based on their skills and knowledge sets. It makes it easy to find expertise, to “know what Credit Suisse knows.”
3. Learning is becoming more mobile. Millennials view the Internet as something that comes to them not something they go to. With over 2 billion mobile devices in use, mobiles have now eclipsed PC’s in the marketplace. We should remember that as we consider delivery options for current and new programs. At Sun Microsystems, technical training is being delivered globally to field engineers on their iPhones, seems like this model will continue to gain traction in the coming months.
4. Finally, after many demo’s of new tools, programs, games for learning and metaphorical learning experiences, we closed with the need for learning professionals to:
   • Focus less on how technology is changing learning and more on how the learners, especially the 80 million Millennials, are bringing new expectations and demands to the workforce. These include being able to use the same applications they have grown up with, such as Instant Messaging, Mobile web conferencing, BlackBerries and video-sharing on-the-job.
   • Be open to new needs and expectations of four generations in the workforce.
   • Understand and share how to make change happen in an organization. It’s not easy but there are lessons in how to improve your odds of success with implementing innovations in corporate learning.

if you are interested in learning more about the Learning Innovation Network, send me an email at jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com We are looking for more learning departments operating “on the edge.”

[tags]Millennials, Sun Microsystems, Google, BlackBerry, Web 2.0, Learning Innovation Network [/tags]