Voice of Lumesse

Yesterday evening I was reading a book I downloaded on my kindle called a Practical Guide to Positive Psychology. 

The first concept they introduced to the reader was to understand is that ‘happiness’ is a combination of two key components – hedonic well-being (championed by the Greek philosopher Aristippus) which is all about finding ‘pleasure in the moment’ and Eudaimonic well-being (championed by Aristotle) which consists of ‘doing what is worth doing’.  

Thursday 17 May is National Learning at Work day, with events promoting Learning at work happening across the UK. Here at Lumesse, to support the day, we've created these Top Ten Tips for Learning to help and encourage business to make learning fun and relevant:

Motivating and engaging employees through learning – 10 Top Tips from Lumesse

1) Make learning social - Make learning fun and interactive through a community, whether you have a classroom, e-learning or blended learning approach. Use social networking to connect remote learners and share knowledge, experience and results. 

2) Know your learners - one size does not fit all.  Understand your learning community, how they want to learn and what motivates them, because people learn best when they are comfortable with the learning environment. Build up a menu of learning models that include learning for IT-phobic as well as IT-literate staff. 

3) Keep it simple, keep it easy - User engagement should be your primary focus at the start of your learning in the workplace journey.  Developing a learning interface that is clear, simple, easy to use and ‘wows’ your learners is the key to engaged learners.

4) Think about the channel - Design your learning content to reflect the learning environment.  What works in the classroom may not translate into an engaging e-learning programme.  For example, if you’re building a mobile learning module, keeping it short, sharp and punchy will make it effective.

5) Learn like a child by making it fun with gamification – research shows that children learn quickly because game-based learning strategies are powerful motivations for education.  It helps make learning compelling and engaging – adults are competitive too. Earning points, simulation, role playing and opportunities to win prizes aren’t just strategies for the kids!

6) Celebrate success - motivate and engage further learners by promoting key achievements within the learning community that encourage others to follow suit or complete an e-learning assignment.

7) Use mobile learning for quick wins - Short learning courses designed for smartphones and tablets, such as quizzes and games, can be developed specifically to push out to the learning community to reinforce your core learning programme.

8) Create an experience, not just a course - make your learning an entire experience and not a one-off course.  Create an online and offline learning experience that is stimulating, easy to navigate and visually compelling.

9) Keep it relevant - Adult learners appreciate immediate relevancy, so create learning that can be applied right away day-to-day work life.  Learning taken and not applied quickly by the learner is wasted learning. 

10) Keep it personal – Remember that adults have a breadth of experience, so ensure learning includes extra resources for personal exploration.  Videos, podcasts, resources and references provide an opportunity to construct knowledge in a way that is personal for each learner.

And finally - Don’t do learning for the sake of learning - align learning with your employees’ goals and personal development plans.

Read more at http://www.lumesse.com/what-we-do/integrated-talent-management/learning

The header for this entry is taken from a quote, here it is in full:

"No organisation can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organisation to make ordinary human beings perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each one’s strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organisation is to enable common people to do uncommon things."

(Peter Drucker, Management Consultant)

As Lumesse TalentLink continues its growth beyond recruiting with Succession and Performance planning (and more!) I'm going back to basics with research and personal development on these topics.

I get asked lots of questions by e-Learning authors on what template to use when they are creating e-Learning using our Authoring tool CourseBuilder. It’s a good question, but to be honest I don't always think I'm the best person to ask. Although I have an opinion and experience I always feel these types of questions are best answered by a learning designer, someone who writes content day in and day out.

As social media spreads like wild fire across the globe businesses are falling into two different camps. Those that do (social) and those that don't.

One of the biggest things that stops an organisation transforming their way of working into being more open, collaborative, sharing, dare I say social, is the culture.

This makes HR (for me) one of if not the biggest part of the change process needed. Social HR will become vital but what does it really mean?

How many times recently have you come across blog posts, articles and campaigns highlighting the plight of learners who are forced to sit through ‘boring’ e-learning courses?  From a learning design perspective, one of the many areas that could help this cause is to think about the best way to structure e-learning and how learners will use it.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about social media, being social and that it needs to be integrated into Talent Management. But does it? Do we really know what needs to be integrated and how to use it?

Let me take an example.

We imagine an organization that uses goals for its employees. These goals are individual, collective and maybe company wide. Could be "Increase my leadership skills" or "reach 50 million in EBITDA", whatever the goal is we now need to be social about it?