Social Media: A new training tool at the workplace

Social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is gaining popularity among the employees especially the generation Y and generation Z who are now entering the workforce. This is impacting the learning and development tools being adopted by the organisations, forcing the organisations to have a proper social media policy in the workplace and also educating the workforce about the do’s and don’ts of the proper usage of the social media at the workplace.

It is an enhancement to the traditional learning processes at the organisations. What it used to maybe a full day dedicated for training, wherein, a trainer would be called for giving specialised lectures on a particular topic evolved into e-learning. The advent of IT impacted a lot the way learning was done in the organisations. E-learning revolutionized the skills addition for the employees and it also cut down the costs involved in the training with the availability of training software at a comparatively reduced price rather than arranging the training programs again and again.

Chat? Text? Status Update? Blog? Tweet? The new in-thing for the employees. The organisations are exploring ways to create new social media strategy for their businesses. There is a large Corporation with its new Social Media Guidelines. As per Digital Strategist at this MNC, the social media policies does not necessary means that the employees will just understand the policies and incorporate them in their daily work life. However, it is to train the employees to use them effectively and efficiently to reach towards the organisation’s business goals and also to participate in the social media.

As per the latest report from Awareness, Inc. more than 75% of the employees are now using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for businesses purposes, which is up from 15 percent in 2007. Informal learning is becoming a key part of learning and development in the organisations.

Now the employees can share the problem within the company on an internal sharing website and multiple minds can be put to work and a more optimum solution can be found to the problem.  The employees can look into as what was the diagnosis to a similar problem and take help from that. This is learning without borders in a global environment. One such example of this learning environment is a database at one of the largest corporations which consists of over 15000 articles from employees defining, collaborating and documenting their part of the organisation workspace.

Some upcoming social media programs are like ‘Tweet like you mean it’, ‘Importance of Brand equity in social media’ and ‘Mobile marketing’. With increased competitiveness and dynamic business environment, the organisations are compelled towards creating a dynamic learning mindset. Within no time there would soon be ‘Chief Learning Officer’ who would put emphasis on rapid, collaborative and self directed learning. The new social learning can help people to become more informed, gain a wider perspective and to be able to make better decisions by engaging with others.    

Reference: : http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/intels_social_media_employee_t.html