Thursday, September 26, 2013

After Our First Session:

I hope you all enjoyed our first session. 

1. Please answer the poll question at right: What's your favorite tool?  

2. Please add a comment (click on "commentsbelow). What do you see as opportunities for and challenges to using blogs or wikis (or other social tools) with your workforce and content? How would you overcome the challenges?

7 comments:

  1. I think there is a lot of awesome potential for blogs and especially wikis to benefit at minimum my training team group. We have teams in two separate locations, and three of us who are either telecommuters or solos in an office. We have lots of new policies, procedures, and things changing, especially related to our LMS. It would be great to have a place to share updates, and especially a crowd sourced location where we all can consistently update the P&P page as things happen instead of relying on sending information to one person to update. This would also prevent the flow of Word documents with out of date information. I was very intrigued by the possibility that SharePoint features these options, though I desperately need to figure out more of the potentials as well as what permissions I would need to use it.

    For the company at large, it may be difficult to really implement blogs and/or wikis effectively. We have started Yammer within the past year or two, and there is a definite growth in adoption. That said, I think Yammer and social networks like them are different entities and different uses and purposes from blogs or wikis. Even when divided into groups like we have them, the way users interact with them is just different. To really adopt a corporate wide blog, or even a division wide blog for our purposes, would involve a lot of political wrangling and discussion. I think it could have great benefits for the company, it would just be a lot of work to bring it together.

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  2. I think sometimes we try to fit the people to the tool rather than the other way around, and I have a story about that. Remind me in Session 2 to tell you about it?

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  3. I completely agree with Phil & Jane. We have also adopted Yammer, but we see people feeling overwhelmed with too many places to check things, and therefore yammer is dying down.
    I use Yammer in our new hire to have them "yam" about what they learned and how it will impact their job role. They can also quiz each other on what they learned. Other than things like this, I think Phil is right, a lot of wrangling would need to happen for blogs, wikis, etc..to have a bigger scope in the company.

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  4. I think an opportunity is to have group discussions about global changes that our team wants to make for templates, or to share ideas about a storyboard or graphics when designing courses. Another opportunity would be to have pre-work, post-work, and ongoing assignments posted to blogs.

    A challenge is providing incentives for people to take time to comment and read comments from others. To drive the behavior away from emailing everything and towards blogging. Maybe a way to do this is to end a meeting 15 mins early and give people time to go out to the blog and post. I also think the issue could be a comfort level with what people are writing and who will be viewing it.

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  5. Having to continuously update and sometimes retrain our salespeople, a blog or wiki could be a great tool to get them to start to collaborate more. From our end, its a quick and easy way to give out information and then they can share successes and / or failures on how to utilize this in the field.

    Plus we really like getting their feedback in general and they would be more open to do so digitally than in person or on the phone.

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  6. We need to find a way to replace email with something else rather than add on the 'something else' as additional work. I have been able to nearly eliminate email and now find it a ridiculously time-consuming and clumsly tool. How can we make other tools more organic.

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  7. Also, to Alison's point: People find time to talk about what they want to talk about. People talk about their work all the time. We need to make sure the conversations have value to them.

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