While the heightened awareness of corporate social responsibility was originally borne out of business scandals and crisis, it is now here to stay as a business strategy. As Coca-Cola’s Chairman and CEO E. Neville Isdell said in the company 2006 Corporate Responsibility Review (opens PDF), "businesses must be a force for positive global change—one community at a time." Isdell believes that committed employees who believe in the company they work for, perform better. It’s that simple. He then goes on to say these employees who believe in the company’s mission often times have higher levels of employee morale, productivity and ultimately this translates favorably into the company’s brand. So for a company’s corporate social responsibility efforts to have real value, they must have a "line of sight" connection to the business goals. If they do not, they are really just philanthropy. As I was reading about Coca-Cola’s CSR strategy I was thinking how we as learning and talent development professionals provide opportunities for our employees to be engaged in learning & development while also being involved in corporate social responsibility projects on behalf of the company. While it may seem a stretch, I think the next alliance within FORTUNE 500 firms will be between the heads of talent development and the heads of a company’s foundation. Some companies are already headed in this direction—notable is UBS Learning & Development who has begun to build alliances with a number of key philanthropies to build leadership development "moments of learning" into the CSR projects. Why does this make so much sense? Well, the target audience of Millennial managers has most likely been involved in social responsibility projects for most of their student and working lives. It is a natural extension to combine learning & development with corporate social responsibility. In fact a recent survey conducted by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education surveyed 1,943 students ages 26-30 years old at 15 business schools to find out about their attitudes towards business and society. Top line findings included of this Aspen Institute survey include: Business students are thinking more broadly about the primary responsibilities of a company. In addition to citing shareholder maximization and satisfying customer needs, more students are also saying "creating value for the communities in which they operate" should be a primary business responsibility. MBA students are expressing more interest in finding work that offers the potential of making a contribution to society (26% of respondents in 2007 say this is an important factor in their job selection compared with 15% in 2002). These Millennials do in fact appear to be interested in integrating CSR with broader business goals. As you consider how you can build a bridge between these two initiatives, ask yourself a few questions: What is the current alliance between CSR and Talent Development functions? Is your company’s approach to CSR based upon business priorities and achieving business objectives? This should be the same as its approach to talent management. What specific business outcomes are you working to achieve in your CSR and how are these consistent with your business outcomes needed from leadership programs? What pilot projects can be started as a way to build a partnership between your company’s Foundation and Talent Management? The champions of CSR and Talent Management really both want the same end result—to make CSR and Talent Management a major part of the core decision-making process at senior levels. Is your company beginning a dialogue to partner with CSR efforts? What has been your experience? What are lesson learned? How are you reporting these efforts? I hope you share this with our readers so we can start a conversation.

The answer is most likely no, your Intranet is not nearly as easy to use as Google. But a growing number of companies are looking to their Intranet to do just that - operate in a social way so employees can share, collaborate and find information. While I have written in past posts about the benefits of starting a company blog, there is no reason why blogging should be your first foray into the world of social media. In fact, I could build a case that maybe you should start with a project that is not threatening to your IT or legal department, not to mention your PR department. Re-vamping your company Intranet to include wiki’s, tagging rating and even image galleries may in fact be an interesting starting point on your path toward social media. One company that is actually doing this is a brand name you will know, especially if you are single - eHarmony.com. Online dating is a big and growing business. According to Jupiter Communications Inc, in 2003 consumers spent $313 million on US based dating Web sites and this number will climb to more than $600 million by the end of 2008. eHarmony is the Internet’s fastest growing relationship service and its user base is doubling every quarter, adding 10,000-15,000 new users a day, the company is growing at 30% a year with over 20 million registered users in all 50 states and 191 countries. In fact, you can impress your friends by asking them if they know how many people who meet on eHarmony actually end up getting married? Answer 236 every day. Now that I have your attention, let’s focus on the eHarmony Intranet - it was broken. It required knowledge of HTML coding to make changes and was very cumbersome to use. So the eHarmony HR Head decided to re-vamp the company Intranet as a way to build greater employee collaboration and knowledge sharing. The company behind this effort is accurately named, ThoughtFarmer and they have been called the company that builds engaging Intranets for "Intranet-haters." But the story gets more interesting because as a result of re-vamping the eHarmony Intranet, more departments at eHarmony are putting their information on the Intranet and encouraging employees to contribute new ideas through the new Intranet. All of this improved communication has actually resulted in new ideas for product improvements and cost savings at eHarmony. Now the question for readers: as more companies explore using the Intranet for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing, who owns the responsibility for researching and then re-vamping the intranet - IT, HR or Marketing & Communications? Answer-all of the above. The Intranet was once an IT initiative but now it is a business initiative with HR often taking the lead in forming a cross functional team to re-vamp both the company Intranet as well as the HR/Learning portal. Why? Because having a voice on projects which provide tangible business outcomes is the future in many evolving HR and Talent roles. Share with us - who owns your Intranet and do you see your involvement in a re-design as part of your role? Technorati Tags: ThoughtFarmer, social media, intranet, Human Resrouces, eHarmony

As learning organizations experiment with leveraging Web 2.0 tools to create online communities of practice, many Chief Learning Officers, heads of human resources and talent management should take a lesson from Chief Marketing Officers who have created online communities for marketing purposes. Many of these online communities have failed, and sadly, produce fancy web sites that few customers ever visit. Let me state, I am a strong advocate of online communities of practice for extending learning into the workplace. But, we, are learning professionals, must learn from the marketing pro’s about what works and how to create and nurture engaging online communities, and avoid them become a ghost town. In a groundbreaking survey of 100 businesses that have created online communities for marketing purposes, Deloitte found that many of these sites fail to gain traction with customers. In fact, the statistics outlined below are a reason for CLO’s and human resources professionals to pause before launching their own online communities. Of the 100 businesses surveyed by Deloitte: Thirty-five percent of the online communities have less than 100 members Less than 25% have more than 1,000 members 6% of businesses spent over $1 million to launch these online communities So why is this happening? Deloitte identified a number of common blunders that we can take note of before undertaking online communities for learning purposes: Blunder #1: Bells and Whistles trap: Companies launching online communities often get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Alternative: Do research to understand the needs and "pain points" of the online community instead of investing in the latest technology tools that you fall in love with. Blunder #2: Too few resources are spent on community management and facilitation. Remember this is a new endeavor for both the company and the potential community members. Deloitte found that 45% of the survey respondents identified poorly managed online communities as a significant barrier to their effectiveness. Survey respondents stated the quality of the community manager and their online facilitation skills were two features that greatly impact a community’s success. Blunder #3: A lack of hard business metrics. While business that create online communities for marketing purposes say they do this to generate customer loyalty and word of mouth marketing, their most frequent metric is simply the number of hits to the site. Some metrics proposed include: number of in-bound links, rankings in Google and impact on the share of market numbers. Some questions for you to consider: Are you putting the "right" people, processes and technologies in place to create, sustain and nurture online communities? How are you measuring the success of these online communities? Are you connecting with the "marketing folks" at your organization to learn how they are using online communities? Share your thoughts. I look forward to your comments. Technorati Tags: Online communities; Deloitte, Chief Learning Officer, Chief Marketing Officer

Last week’s post, "Is Your Online Community Delivering Value For Your Organization?" drew quite a bit of email traffic. The overwhelming response was this: Creating online communities can be a game-changing strategy for a learning & development function - if you are clear about your business objective and how to engage and reward participation. 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: What business objectives are you trying to achieve? What pain points/passions/areas of general interest do your community members need help with or want to give assistance to? 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. 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. 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. Technorati Tags: Online communities; Groundswell, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Learning Officer

The number of people on Facebook has now exceeded 90 million and the fastest rowing segment of these new users are those over the age of 25. As a result, it’s becoming quite common to ask: Will you be able to access Facebook and other social networks from your work computer? 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? Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, gartner, enterprise 2.0, new york times

I got my text message that Joe Biden will be the Democratic Vice President candidate at 3:00 am on Saturday, August 23rd. And YES I could not help but think about the now famous TV commercial about ensuring the next President of the USA is qualified enough to take "that" 3:00 am phone call in the White House. So I started to think about how explosive the growth of text messaging has been whether you are a Millennial or trying to synch up with today’s Millennials. There’s no doubt about it: Millennials have abandoned email in favor of texting and instant messaging. So here are a few questions to ask yourself and your team members: How will the growing usage of texting impact our world of learning & development (especially in light of how Millennials are addicted to texting. Will CEO’s be sending updates to their teams via texting instead of emails? Will we be texting short updates of knowledge via a text? Some quick research gives us a context for the explosive growth of text messaging: According to Gartner the number of text messages sent to and from mobile phones will more than double over the next two years to 2.3 trillion messages sent by 2010. The number of messages transmitted over short message service (SMS) systems in 2005 was estimated at $936 billion, according to Gartner. Total revenues from text messaging is forecast to grow to $72.5 billion in 2010 from $39.5 million. In fact marketers across a number of industries such as hotels, travel,and food chains are gearing up for text message marketing. Rationale: they see how consumers are always "on-the-go," and increasingly rely more heavily on their cell phones as their main communication device. China tops the average number of text messages sent by text users. Chinese sent almost 430 billion text messages last year, approximately 1000 per cell phone user. There are some interesting examples of companies who are leveraging texting into new hire programs — one case in point is Ernst & Young, a company that has been a magnet for Millennials. E&Y regularly sends out messages from senior executives and welcome notes from the CEO to new hires via text. Will texting be the next mode of delivery for short bursts of learning? Take the poll in the column to the right to see how many texts our readers are sending/receiving in a month. Share how this will impact learning & development. Technorati Tags: texting, gartner, smsing, corporate learning, millennials

Google is launching Google Video for business, a customized video platform aimed at businesses for internal use. Google is targeting Heads of training and HR and anyone that uses internal videos at the company. The product will be included in Google Apps Premier Edition for free, with 3 GB of storage per user account. This is a "Zero billion dollar market today" Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. But we will change this and Google Video For Business will be easy to use. These videos will basically have the same features and limitations as YouTube, including upload size and file type limits. Videos have access control, even if they are embedded outside of the intranet or Google Apps, and can be tagged and commented on just like YouTube. As the video below states, these videos are quick and easy to create and can be uploaded and shared in a number of ways: for training, to communicate end of quarter results, to showcase famous people who visit Google headquarters like Obama and Bloomberg and finally just for some laughs and fun during a stressful overworked the day. So, what do you think as head of training or Human Resources at your firm? How will you use this? Will this replace your in-house video production crew? Will you use video more in video sharing sites to describe a new service or for quick updates? Technorati Tags: Google, Human Resources, Video Sharing, HR

I quickly get a sense of what is resonating with my blog posts by the response in emails on the blog and calls to me personally. Well, the CEO as a Blogger talked about how forward thinking CEO’s are blogging and the role HR and Learning senior executives must have to ensure the CEO as a Blogger is a success. Details are described in the post. So when I watched NBC nightly news interview with Bill Marriott, the CEO of Marriott International, I was very interested as he described his process for blogging and then I was really amazed when he shared that his blog called Marriott on the Move has been responsible for over $4 million in incremental bookings to a Marriott property since the inception of Bill’s blog in January, 2007. There are now 60 CEO’s among the Fortune 500 who are blogging. Is your CEO one of those? IF not should he/she be? The NBC story featured 2 CEO blogs, Marriott and Coca-Cola’s, as examples of how CEO’s are establishing these blogs to communicate openly and honestly with customers and key stakeholders. But the story gets better because in the case of Bill Marriott, it turns out he either writes his blog posts in long hand, or dictates them and they are then transcribed and entered onto the blog. In Bill’s own blog he shares in detail how he partners with his communications specialist to create the blog which is posted on an Awareness platform and how he reads customer comments and stays in touch… But here is a question for our Human Resources and Learning readers: If your CEO is blogging, are you involved in this along with your Head of communications? I see the lines blurring between enterprise learning initiatives and corporate communications initiatives, and all too often the HR and Learning executives are not being proactive enough to partner with other internal stakeholders. It should not be just the Head of Corporate Communications identifying and helping to launch new initiatives like the CEO as Chief Blogger. By being involved in these type of initiatives, you can: learn first hand what your CEO is thinking learn about what your customers want more of in terms of new products and services be associated with a leading edge initiative that in the case of Marriott, has led to adding $4 million in new bookings. Share your first hand experiences here for many to learn from… Technorati Tags: CEO as Blogger, CLO, Marriott, Awareness

Amid all the economic news of recent weeks there was an interesting release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) telling us what we already know: Now is not the time to retire. According to the BLS, more older workers are staying in their jobs longer or returning after retiring. And as a result, among workers who are 65 and older, 56 percent work full time compared to 44% 13 years ago. So much for the "brain drain" we all feared only a few years ago. See the chart above for more details on this. With the current economic turmoil, and the vaporization of retirement savings, people will be in the workplace longer and we will have all four generations working together side by side. What does that do to the workplace? What does that do to the demands placed on the learning organization and the talent management organization? These developments are particularly timely as New Learning Playbook is conducting a groundbreaking survey that examines the workplace of the future and the demands the four generations—Seniors, Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennial Generation-will place on employers. You are invited to participate in a global survey of workers from around the world. This survey only takes 10 minutes and you can have a voice into what this means as companies grapple with how to deal with four generations @ work. I am also conducting personal interviews on this topic and will share all results with our readers. Please click here to participate in the survey. I will be examining these results in terms of what they mean for recruiting, developing and motivating four generations of employees, as well as how to create a working environment conducive to all generations. In the meantime, if you have a personal story you want to share about how your organization is dealing with this issue, I would really like to hear from you. Send me an email. Technorati Tags: four generations, brain drain, millennials, baby boomers, seniors, generation x

Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies and Mike Barger, Chief Learning Officer, both at JetBlue University (JBU), the training arm for JetBlue, had a vision in 2007: to create a way for JetBlue’s dispersed faculty of 200 to come together online, share best practices, and contribute to the collective pool of knowledge at JetBlue. Christensen turned to blog-based collaboration software from Awareness Networks to achieve this. A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year. It’s the latest in a string of reports this year - from Awareness, Forrester and others - which provide data about the growth of web 2.0 in the enterprise. It’ll be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester. The software selected provided a vehicle for JetBlue faculty to talk to one another, not just about process improvements in learning & development, but also to share photos from family vacations, weddings and birthdays. The thinking behind this choice was that as the faculty got to know one another better as individuals, they would more easily share lessons and best practices as professionals. Discussion on the blog, which operates more like an online forum, has, in Christensen’s mind, done an excellent job of uniting the JBU faculty as a more cohesive team while also allowing for an easy exchange of knowledge. Christensen blogs each week and usually tackles a provocative topic such as the one above entitled: Who Owns My Learning History? His goal in this is to engage the faculty in timely topics and have them suggest improvements. In this particular blog post, he suggests a solution: a smartcard to hold one’s learning transcript. In the past six months since inception, almost 50% of the JetBlue faculty members have been posting and commenting on the forum. The goal I see in all of this is to create a community of practice first among learning & development professionals—to challenge them to be the Web 2.0 pioneers for the firm. As the JetBlue example illustrates, the process of getting to know one another better through the use of these technologies can smoothly segue into suggesting ways to use these tools to increase innovation and collaboration across enterprises. Is your firm doing this? What lessons have you uncovered? Technorati Tags: JetBlue, Awareness, Chief Learning Officer, Blogs