Group items tagged

"On days like today, however, he participates in a program called "Googler to Googler," which places employees from across departments into teaching roles that would otherwise be filled by the HR department (or rather, as Google calls it, "People Operations"). Green's class is part of the Google core curriculum, which includes courses on management, orientation, and skills such as public speaking. Other classes taught Googler to Googler--everything from kickboxing to parenting--were initiated and designed by an employee."

"The first one, It's the Company's Job to Help Employees Learn written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan (HBR 18 July) made a number of significant points. Here are a few soundbites: "most jobs today demand … the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one's current job" "a major pillar in Google's recruitment strategy is to hire "learning animals"" "Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today's job market." "workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth" "So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? Select for it … Nurture it … Reward it""

"In the process of applying technology, we can't forget that workforce engagement, the measure of whether an employee merely does the minimum required of them, versus proactively driving innovation and new value for the organization, is the ultimate objective here. Thus, engagement can only ever be partially accounted for by deploying the latest new collaborative technology, and probably significantly less than many of its proponents would have you believe."

"We believe technology is changing culture everywhere in the world, leading to the emergence of a new model of leadership. Employees are now more confident, more mobile, more demanding, more idealistic in some cases, and less willing to be company people. Employees, more than ever, are individualists"

"What Skills will Self-Sustain Digital Workers? To be fair to IT and HR departments around the world, the digital workplace target does move incredibly fast and is picking up speed. And there never was a finish line. Fortunately, I believe there are novel, effective and increasingly well-understood new ways for most organizations to address their current digital workplace gaps, and it's not (just) by "giving up non-essential control", deploying liberal BYOD/BYOT programs to cultivate employee-led change, figuring out how to do things like learn or change behavior faster, or any of the ten strategies I've previously recommended."

potential topic for workshop

Jane Hart - a major shift "In this post, however, I want to consider the Individual's Perspective of Workplace Learning. First of all, please note, I have not used the word Learner here, because for the Individual - the employee, the worker - it is clear it is not all about the learning but about the work. It's primarily about getting their work done, addressing performance problems, and being part of a functioning team - and in fact learning is often an unconscious activity here! But it is also about personal improvement through both company-organised and self-initiatives, and about keeping up to date with what is happening in their industry or profession so that they remain relevant. So, here is a graphic that shows 10 ways how an individual might learn at and for work."

Change is hard, especially in a large organization. Numerous studies have shown that employees tend instinctively to oppose change initiatives because they disrupt established power structures and ways of getting things done. However, some leaders do succeed-often spectacularly-at transforming their workplaces. What makes them able to exert this sort of influence when the vast majority can't? So many organizations are contemplating turnarounds, restructurings, and strategic shifts these days that it's essential to understand what successful change agents do differently. We set out to gain that insight by focusing on organizations in which size, complexity, and tradition make it exceptionally difficult to achieve reform.

""The untold story behind today's most innovative brands, however, is what happens behind the scenes. While success stories are plentiful, what most people don't see is the amount of trial, error, and learning that goes into setting up workflows, empowering employees, and figuring out initiatives to prioritize. Regardless of whether you're a part of an established company or two-person startup, the task of bringing new ideas to market is hard." - The Next Web"

So much to do, so little time...I'm posting on this article by Jarche...for sure. "For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization. This is a challenge for government, as our institutions are premised on many assumptions that are no longer valid. Changing the worldview of politicians, public servants, and citizens will be a key part of addressing the issue of wealth redistribution. Old mental models will not help us much."