Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 - (Page 45)

IN PRACTICE COPING WITH CULTURAL BARRIERS TO E-LEARNING rofessionals involved in the creation and delivery of training in international enterprises will inevitably run up against the issue of cultural differences. For instance, many of the people in the learning and development profession have discovered a general resistance among European workers toward e-learning and computer-based training. They respond far better to interpersonal, face-to-face modes of training than to linear, technical modalities, which they regard as impersonal. By contrast, employees in North America and the Asia-Paciﬁc region are much more receptive to this kind of learning. However, the alternatives to e-learning in Europe — incurring large expenditures of time and money for traveling students and/or instructors, or simply not delivering the training there — are untenable. How then does one overcome the cultural barrier and provide them with the training they need? Vince Eugenio, Ph.D., chief learning ofﬁcer of Randstad North America and global head of e-learning for international stafﬁng ﬁrm Randstad Holding, has worked on that issue extensively during his tenure at the company. Randstad’s workforce is truly global: Its learning population is spread throughout 17 countries, and a minority of them are located in the United States. What’s more, Randstad was founded in the Netherlands — with its corporate headquarters in Amsterdam — so European sensibilities must be taken into account when it comes to any operational issue, including training. “Things are heavily in-the-classroom; it’s very much face-toface,” Eugenio said of Randstad’s training programs in Europe. “The challenge that I face is helping my European colleagues understand that what I’m doing is not e-learning. It’s much bigger than that. What we’re doing is managing learning and development.” Like many major companies, Randstad relies on a broad mix of training modalities, Eugenio said. “We use conference calling a lot. We use leader-led instruction. We will train managers in the ﬁeld, and we’ll support them with facilitator guides, participator guides and that type of thing, to train their folks at the local level. We use job shadowing, and we have very sophisticated checklists that show them week by week what they get to be doing.” Part of getting them enthusiastic about e-learning is showing them how it will ﬁt into the bigger picture of training. “It’s much more than e-learning,” he said. “I’m looking at it more broadly, from the perspective of how we can manage the learning function globally and what we can gain from that global management. For example, we have fairly consistent business concepts from country to country. We are looking at providing global-level learning products that would be essentially 80 percent the same from country to country, with some local variation. We’d use our online platform to drive consistency and execution.” Obviously, that local variation always will include language. Currently, Randstad offers e-learning programs in some form in English — both United Kingdom and United States idioms — French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Dutch and German. There is a push to expand e-learning further within each nation Randstad operates in, but Eugenio stressed this would have to be done prudently, meaning one country at a time. CLO P evolution as a strategic service within the organization. Synchronous should apply to the shelf life of needs and ideas as much as it does to the teacher-learner connection. And learning groups have a unique role to play in putting all these ends together, a need that currently is unmet. What to Do With It All? In this linguistic journey, in the world these words created, I have a revised set of “design” ideals to strive for: 1. Forget about the “best” blend, using any words. Find high-leverage points within a system of people and use them. Best practices, conventions and methodologies hold little weight in complex global organizations. Development is a guerilla change campaign. Success is repeatable, but not through duplication. Speed and adaptation are critical. Cast the models aside and use every tentacle. Think about the right “ends” for your organization’s hopes and problems. 2. Use media like never before. Provide new tools and services that create connections around people and data. Begin to think of synchronicity as a service you provide, not a design principle. In short, help your business build a practice of creation/knowledge agility, and support it with semantic Web technology. It’s all about getting learning to people when and where they need it. And then get out of the way. 3. Ask and respond. Take part in the new agenda. Show humility, speed and new openness to ideas. There’s an explosion of new technology entering the market to build capability in ways you probably haven’t considered. Expect to feel overpowered and out of control. It will pass once the muscle develops. It’s a new age of blending learning, an age in which individuals interact with ideas and business problems from hundreds of sources — some approved, some unapproved — synchronously. Concepts and models are evolving not in book time, but in blog time. Five of the 10 best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 were written on cell phones. For a learning organization to deliver in this new world, it must embrace and empower, not control. We must be the equippers, the suppliers, in the same way we have with core skills and abilities. But in shifting the focus from equipping a skills inventory to equipping skills and the process, the portfolio of synchronous and asynchronous becomes much more powerful. The blend itself becomes the initiative, in which speed, personalization and proximity are key. Grow the new tentacle. Find the ends. Discard the recipe. CLO Adam Nelson is chief learning architect for Ninth House. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • July 2008 • www.clomedia.com – Brian Summerfield, bsummerfield@clomedia.com 45 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - July 2008

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five A Customer-Driven Approach to Molding Tomorrow’s Leaders The Home Depot: Accelerated Leadership CLO Profile Birth of a Salesman: Selling Learning to Solve Business Issues Selling Learning’s Potential at Siemens Transform Corporate Learning With a User Network Wiki Training Increases Productivity for RMC Vanguard Mortgage Lessons From the Feds: Mapping Learning to Strategic Initiatives Department of Labor Centralizes Content Synchronous and Asynchronous: What’s in a Name? Coping With Cultural Barriers to E-Learning The Manager’s Responsibility for Employee Learning Case Study Business Intelligence In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008

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