WordPress is a user-friendly blogging platform that allows you to quickly and easily publish posts on whatever topic suits your fancy. Software enables you to include links, videos, music and other media to enhance your posts and allows you to edit layouts, formatting, themes and colors to fit your needs.

Blogs can be a very useful social learning tool, providing a space to share knowledge, opinions and insights into any topic that you choose. Learners and interested parties can subscribe to your blog to ensure they see all new content as it is created and comment sections allow for interaction and discussion around information shared.

One great aspect of WordPress and other blogs, is the ability to incorporate media from other sources. This requires a monetary subscription; but if signed up, the blogger can imbed resources like TedTalk videos, pictures and infographics from other sites and podcasts or sound clips to enhance and support their own posts.

Probably the most challenging aspect of using a blog for social learning is gaining attention and followers for your writing. With so many blogs being available on a limitless number of topics, a successful blogger would need to share their work and promote it within other learning communities centered on their topic.

For myself, in particular, I would like to create a blog focused on leadership and development within a retail/ retail pharmacy setting. My blog would share tips and tricks for recruiting for the talent pipeline, onboarding new members of leadership, training and developing this talent and grooming them for management positions. Using a blog format would allow me to create a searchable database of best practices and methods for development, performance management, engagement and creating a collaborative team. In addition, sharing stories of successes, challenges and humor anecdotes of life within retail leadership will help to establish relationships with my readers, and other potential industry leaders.

Using blogs as both a resource and a creative outlet for your knowledge and experience can be productive and rewarding once you are able to explore all of the functionality and different ways to gain credibility and attention.

“Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.” – David Alston

Social media has become such a mainstay of modern life that it is inevitable that online communities of team members from your organization will crop up over time. Employees will naturally seek out spaces to share experiences and interact with others going through the same things. Within these communities, team members will share job or industry-related humor, tips, tricks and best practices, vent to one another, ask and answer questions and share news and gossip from the far geographical reaches of your company and across departments and levels.

To get the most out of your companies social media presence, leaders and facilitators should think about creating the community in which you would like to see your team members interact. Providing a safe space to express views and seek information and support not only shows that the organization cares about its team members but also encourages networking, interaction, feedback and discussion. By including the presence of leadership and facilitators, you can work to ensure the accuracy of information being shared as well as monitoring for confidentiality and appropriateness of interactions.

Providing a company new source with commenting ability is another great way to implement a social learning culture within your company. Sharing timely and relevant news articles about things going on within the organization allows transparency and understanding of initiatives. Allowing team members to comment and discuss company changes and other things that are happening shows that the company values their opinions. Providing timely and inclusive responses to comments and feedback will encourage your team members to continue to interact and share views.

Finally, using an e-learning platform that supports discussion can help your organization enhance and deepen understanding of more formal lessons and information sharing. Having the option to comment on, ask questions about and share thoughts around e-learning modules with peers can help to take the learning experience to a new level.

All of these opportunities to interact with peers in different online communities, in addition to fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment within the physical workplace, will increase team member engagement and involvement by showing them that they are indeed a valued and supported part of the team and that their feedback and input can make a different.

Technology is a pervasive and ever-changing part of our lives both outside the organization and within it. Every day we find new ways to bring social media into the workplace. Whether it be recruiting new talent, interacting with customers, establishing collaborative relationships with peers or creating workplace friendships, social media is being used more and more by our team members. With the limitless marketing, information sharing and learning opportunities social media brings the organization, it is not without its risks. The social media presence of our employees reflects on the organization as a whole and creates employee relations liability. With these risks in mind, it is imperative that we create and maintain a comprehensive social media policy to govern online interactions and the representation of our organization.

Problem

            In the current social climate, employees need to be aware of the risks and responsibilities of using social media and how that can and will reflect on them both personally and professionally. This is especially important with the organization beginning to use social media for its own recruiting, marketing, learning, customer service and collaboration uses. There are several considerations to keep in mind for team members using social media and decision-makers in charge of creating policies and monitoring the organizations’ social presence.

            First and foremost, team members need to be educated around the fact that no social media is private and that there is always a way to link their words and behaviors back to them, and therefore back to their organization. Customers, competitors, vendors, investors and partners can and will be exposed to their comments and the way in which they present themselves and in turn use that information in positive or negative ways against the individual as well as the company (Johansson, 2015).

            In addition to avoiding damaging images and comments, team members need to be careful to keep confidential information private and use it only for its intended purpose. Sharing privileged information can be damaging to the company and its strategy as well as the individual professionally and personally. Along the same lines, employees should be aware that they are not to personally speak on the behalf of the company or organization in any official capacity and who is the party responsible for doing so (Johansson, 2015).

            Finally, social media usage presents another dimension to potential harassment issues. Many social media users feel anonymous and brave when interacting online, leading them to say offensive, vulgar, or inappropriate things they wouldn’t normally say in person. Team members need to be aware that this sort of behavior is still considered harassment and will not be tolerated.

            Before any of these issues can be addressed, team members need to be educated and informed of both acceptable and encouraged behavior as well as unacceptable and prohibited behavior. Along with knowing what they should and should not post online, team members need to be informed of the consequences of violating these rules and guidelines and the potential effects it would have on the company and their professional and personal lives.

Recommendations

            The organization’s social media policy should start by exploring the company’s culture and values in order to guide team members toward desired behaviors and interactions, both personally and when interacting on company social media (Idealware, 2012). The policy should outline the ways in which the organization would like to be seen and how team member’s interactions reinforce or contradict the desired image. Team members’ should be educated on the characteristics of a positive reputation and the behaviors that back this.

            Legal and confidentiality issues should be addressed next. Rules pertaining to protecting customer/patient information, company privileged information and announcements, sales, and conflicts of interest should be clear and concise, ensuring understanding and adherence. Consequences of violating these rules should be established.

            Roles will need to be established so that team members understand what their responsibilities and their limitations are as far as creating and sharing social media content. Only designated team members should speak on the behalf of or directly representing the organization to ensure that all information is true, accurate and on brand for the company, avoiding any legal or public relations issues (Idealware, 2012). These people will be responsible for creating content to be shared, answering questions, responding to comments and complaints and posting acceptable images, branding and logos. All employees need to understand how and who to refer questions and requests for information within the company.

            Team members, especially team members in charge of posting to social media on behalf of the organization, should be properly equipped to and understand the importance of crediting creators and authors of content being shared. This will ensure that both the individual and the company are protected from violating copyright laws. On the flipside, users must properly identify themselves or the organization as the creators of any original content to protect their own content.

            Finally, a comprehensive extension of the current harassment policy must be adapted for social media use to protect team members, customers, and patients. This portion of the policy should explicitly explain prohibited behaviors including but not limited to any harassing, racist, sexist, vulgar, sexual or violent content. Any topics or interactions unacceptable for the workplace is unacceptable for social media, both as a team member and as an official spokesperson of the company. When interacting on any organizational area, users should take care to think about how their tone and word choice sounds to the receiver and any observers. Consequences of inappropriate interactions should be communicated clearly, up to and including termination.

Conclusion

            By carefully reviewing what the organization wishes to gain from its relationship with social media and social learning, as well as its culture and values, policy makers should come up with a clear and detailed social media policy outlining acceptable and unacceptable online behaviors, interactions and content. With this policy, the organization can ensure that the company, its team members and its customers get the most out of social media interactions while minimizing risks to reputation, productivity, legality and employee relations (Bhasin, 2019). By doing this, the company will be able to take advantage of the limitless learning and collaboration possibilities while maintaining a safe, respectful and productive environment for recruiting, marketing and teamwork.

In response to the rapidly evolving technological climate and ever-changing service industry, as well as our forward-thinking and innovative strategies toward access, convenience and care for our customers and patients, companies should implement a social learning component for employees to keep up with the new developments and encourage collaboration, problem-solving and buy-in of the endless changes throughout the organization. These new informal avenues of learning and exploring initiatives, software and best practices will help front-line managers stay relevant, productive and engage their teams to the next level.

Social learning is learning from peers and others inside and outside of an organization in different ways including formal and informal ways of learning. Social learning can include organic peer mentorship and Personal Learning Networks, or go-to people for questions, support, sounding board or information. It may also include social media avenues like the Facebook groups, iMessage group chat, lunches following meetings, community forums and more. In each of these channels, employees can share ideas, answer one another’s questions, and distribute content (Bozarth, 2010).

With social learning, managers and facilitators in particular can experience Mentor-Mentee relationships and learn how to use multiple resources and avenues to gather information, formulate plans and solve problems and in turn, through observation and interaction, learn to be an effective resource for others as well. Since filling the talent and succession pipeline is such a focus in order to create and continuously cultivate effective leaders, we should utilize the great leaders we have currently and leverage their knowledge and expertise through social learning to coach up our newer players within the company.

Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube, offer unique opportunities for managers and team members to network and collaborate from long distances. Users can interact from experts and novices from all levels within and outside of an organization, industry or geographical location.

As an organization, the social learning culture could be kicked off through a networking meet and greet, allowing team members from different locations to mingle with their own counterparts and those from different levels in a non-work environment in order to establish relationships and trade stories, thoughts and contact information. This is the first step in assisting with network building among team members.

Social learning can be encouraged and implemented through word of mouth and exploring available tools and resources with fellow managers and our direct reports. “5 Minute Meetings” can be held to feature a different social learning tool available to team members and encourage usage. For instance, one day the featured tool may be the employee forums. On this day, the managers will review the weekly topic with team members, help them navigate to the site and then encourage them to read comments and questions left by peers and add their own input, pointing out responses from the Support Center and other corporate members that show the team members that upper management is listening and involved in the discourse. Another day, the managers may talk about personal networking and encourage assistants from different stores to meet for lunch and establish relationships, share contact information in order to have go-to people for questions and idea generation. Through exposure and education on the tools available, managers can encourage team members to broaden their horizons, build their networks and share ideas and best practices, ask and answer questions and establish cross-functional relationships that will increase innovation, productivity and creative solutions across all departments.

Sources: Bozarth, Jane. (2010). Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning. San Fransico, CA: Pfieffer.