How To Start Implementing Social Learning at Your Organization
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The question “how can I start implementing social learning” is one that I get asked on a weekly basis. More often than not, it stems from wanting to move the organization into the Future of Learning, but not knowing where to start or how to make Minimal Viable Progress; starting to take actionable steps towards getting there eventually. Many are scared their organizations aren’t “ready for it”, which is often just a self-imposed bias based on certain “old-school” characteristics of how the company operates as an organization, not on actual individual employee preferences. Ultimately, it’s in your hands to change it if you want to drive that change.
There are 5 elements to social learning — each of which you can implement with different levels of ambition and get started at a scale that you feel ready for. We’ll walk through each of them below as well as the questions that you can ask yourself in order to start implementing them in your organization too.
1. Engaging User Experience, UI & UX
The reason an engaging user experience is at the core of a social learning approach is that if you don’t have an engaging UX, nothing else matters. Regardless of how engaging and authentic your content is, if it’s hidden 17 clicks behind the intranet, or requires the user to log in every time they want to use it, no one will make the effort to access it in the first place. An easy-to-use, accessible, one-click medium is a must for social learning to work effectively.
Ask yourself;
- How many clicks does it take for your users to access their social learning experiences right now?
- Are you forcing them into a transactional platform (e.g. a HRIS or the same system they are applying for leave in), for something that is experiential? There’s a reason why Meta keeps Instagram and WhatsApp separate — WhatsApp is transactional whereas Instagram is experiential. Do not mix up experiential and transactional and put learning experiences inside your HRIS. That is not a good user experience.
- What’s the look and feel of your current system? Do not underestimate the power of colors and nice design. If it’s gray, blue and white with 3 vertical menu bars and 4 horizontal menu bars, it’s not going to be a visually pleasing experience. It’s going to be an instant detractor, off-putting before your users have even got started.
- Can they access it in the palm of their hands? If it’s not a great mobile experience, forget it. When was the last time you logged into Instagram, Facebook or TikTok on your desktop?
2. Engaging Content
Okay, so you’ve got them into the platform in one click. Great, it’s easy to access! But, now what? People don’t spend hours on Netflix or TikTok because of the amazing UI/UX. UI/UX is still just a hygiene factor, the bare minimum needed to even have a chance of engaging people in 2023. People hang around on Netflix or TikTok to binge watch the content they’ve become addicted to — whether it’s the latest K-drama series or 78 variations of a smoothie recipe. While the user experience is a key factor in getting them there in the first place, the content is what makes them stay.
Ask yourself;
- Does your content have hooks and cliffs? Is it impossible for people to withdraw from it because they just need to know what’s happening next? Check out Nas Daily — a master YouTuber in using hooks and cliffs. He takes fairly banal topics and turns them into blockbuster trailers. Similarly, look at the trailers for the podcast The Diary of a CEO — they have mastered the art of transforming a seemingly ordinary person into someone you just can’t stop watching.
- Does your content have the right speed? It sounds basic but there’s nothing more off putting than slow paced voices in today’s fast-paced content world. Over the last 20 years, the average human attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to just over 8 seconds. If you can’t get past ‘hello’ within the first 8 seconds, you won’t have an audience for the remaining seconds either.
- Are you using the right creators and leveraging the right influencers? Think about what makes people follow creators and influencers. They can relate to them and aspire to be them. Are the people in your content, people who the audience can relate to or aspire to be? Or, are you putting a video of a 75-year old sales coach from Chicago in front of an audience of young sales reps in Jakarta?
- Is your content relevant for the particular audience you’re targeting or is it one-size-fits-none? Are you rolling out the same content to everyone? TikTok doesn’t do that. TikTok doesn’t even roll out the same content to people who, on paper and demographics, seem to be part of the same audience. Every person gets something different, tailored to their unique preferences. If that’s what they are used to receiving outside the workplace, you need to live up to that high consumer preference bar in the workplace too.
3. Authenticity
We’ve all been subjected at one time or another to the stiff instructors, all suited up, looking down the camera lens with a carefully placed plant in the background. They put their hands together in a way that no one would ever choose to naturally and kick off with the “Welcome to this course” in a monotone drone at 0.5x speed. They then go on to lose their audience’s attention with their unnecessary business jargon and by sharing unrelatable case studies involving Company A that is operating in a perfect context as a manufacturing plant in Ohio in 1982. What a great case study!
This is not the real world today. This is not how people communicate or interact with each other in reality. This is not authentic. This is studio-produced, manufactured and scripted, and for most people outside Ohio completely unrelatable.
Ask yourself;
- How can you get real with your own leaders? How can you get them to open up and share their own real and relatable experiences, lessons, successes and failures? Top tip: Never get the PR department involved in creating learning content.
- Do an audit of your current learning content — is it based on real experiences, real case studies, real failures and mistakes? Is it based on a reality that your audience will recognize and can relate to? A reality they have first-hand experience with and have seen for themselves?
- What rehearsed scripts can you throw in the trash today? Real conversations above rehearsed scripts — always.
4. Real-Time
Unlike wine and cheese, learning content does not age well. A case study involving a manufacturing plant in 1982’s Ohio is as relevant to global business professionals today as the fax machine is.
The same goes for your internally created content. I often see content production processes within internal learning organizations that operate slower than a new vaccine testing and approval process. There are too many people involved, too many vetting and approval processes, and too much fear of being imperfect. By the time the learning content is ready and shared internally, it’s already outdated, irrelevant and there’s now a better approach developed by someone else in another department.
Ask yourself;
- What’s your Happening-Capture-Deliver ratio? Measure the time it takes from an internal success to happen in your organization, to the time it’s been captured in a shareable format, to the time it’s delivered to the right people who can benefit from that learning. You should aim for same-day delivery. Yes, that is possible and it is what people expect. They get it from social media, Deliveroo and Amazon all the time. Why can’t they get same-day delivery in the workplace too?
- For non-in-the-moment-learning, how often are you revamping your content? Take for example, onboarding content, company values, sales methodologies, customer engagement models, and other content that is shared internally, does it incorporate all the changes that have happened this quarter, or has it been sitting on that SharePoint site since 2017?
- How agile are your social learning processes? How democratized is the creation of learning content? What are the safeguards or approval processes involved? I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any, rather that these are cultural decisions you need to make intentionally. You should think about them through the lens of which learning culture you would like to develop in your organization.
- And, a similar cultural decision to make is; what balance are you looking to achieve between speed and noise? Just like social media, high speed combined with high democratization is likely to lead to high noise. If you’d like less noise in your social learning culture, you will probably want to play with your speed and democratization levers in a different way.
5. Social Context
No one operates in a vacuum, and the more you can bring your employees’ social context into their learning experiences the more relevant, engaging and applicable it will be for them.
Ask yourself;
- Internal social context: How can you bring their leaders and colleagues into the learning experience? The people they work with every day will have a much more profound impact on their development than some far-away coach being flown in for 48 hours. How can you create a space for shared learning, reflection and action between team members, but also across your organization between business units, seniority levels and geographies?
- External social context: How often do you enable your employees to learn from your customers, vendors, partners and people who operate in your external ecosystem? Every business operates within a wider ecosystem — your employees’ understanding of this wider ecosystem is crucial to your business success.
- How can you leverage social context to amplify the application of learning? How can you leverage your employees’ internal and external social context to drive highly contextual action items that make sense in their own environments? How can you leverage their social contexts to translate learnings into application, and help hold them accountable to the progress they want to make?
Thinking through these 5 elements — User Experience, Engaging Content, Authenticity, Real-Time and Social Context — and how you can elevate them in your own organization will get you off to a great start on your journey of implementing social learning.
I love discussing this topic! I welcome any additions, thoughts, protests, questions or brainstorming invitations to nellie@tigerhall.com.
