Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Quest for Humanity in Corporate Atlanta

Quest for humanity in corporate Atlanta: Finding a place for the teacher idealist in corporate workforce development

IT&D On-site: Fortune 500 Logistics Company

Hosted by:
Learning & Development Manager
Head of Training & Development
Organizational Development
Instructional Design Supervisor
Information Systems
Learning & Development Manager, Corporate Schools
Enterprise Technology Hub
Compliance & Ethics Group

Philosophy: In the case of this organization, the philosophy of the company seems to be the philosophy of the instructional teams we met: “One company; one brand; one vision.” As a classmate ferreted out, the leadership philosophy is also “Servant leadership.” The presentations about the Career Development Process and the Management Learning & Development Process also revealed a strong philosophy of investing in their employees and providing a myriad of opportunities within the organization. Since this company is 100 years old and this training session was the first time we heard the word “union” mentioned, I was reminded of the important roles IT & D and organizational development theories have played in reshaping the employer/employee relationship over the last century in the US.

Taking clues from what we were presented, most of the teams seem to function primarily under objectivist principles. This is not surprising. They must set Health & Safety as its highest priority; similar to the Public Transportation System, as a transportation company, they have no room for mistakes when it comes to training drivers. Yet, in addition to the objectivist style training, the components of social networking shown by the Enterprise Technology Hub are decidedly the most constructivist learning environments we’ve seen in our site visits so far.


Strategy: As with the philosophy, the strategy of the company as a whole informs the strategy of the learning & development team:

Four Strategic Imperatives:
1) Value Added Solutions;
2) Enterprise of Excellence;
3) Building a Winning Team; &
4) Customer Focus.

They also showed signs of using the typical ADDIE model as their strategy for understanding needs, and shaping, developing, implementing and evaluating their solutions. For example, they performed a needs analysis by asking local teams to identify needs for their shared services initiative.

Like the Fortune 500 Printing Services Company, this organization wants their training to be just in time and more mobile.


Tactics: We were introduced to several interesting and innovative tactics during this session, but the word count limit on our site reports will limit me to list only a few of the highlights here:
Shared Services Initiative
Professional and useful interactive simulations
Muscle-memory training for walking
Social networking
Learning Management System: SCORM (Reiser & Dempsey (2007) provide detailed information of this on pg. 293 and point us to a website for more information http://www.adlnet.org/)
Community Internship Program

Resources:ASTD
Maisey Consortium

I was very interested in the Community Internship Program and wanted to post a note about it to see who else might want to discuss it.

They introduced this program to develop more understanding between managers and their staff by requiring managers to spend time in the communities of their fellow employees.

This is a particularly interesting strategy to me in the context of my research into the US-India workforce connections. The external pressures and infrastructural challenges of living in India are quite overwhelming, and it seems that an understanding of this environment could go a long way in bridging the gap between US & Indian team members.

This program also reminded me of McClusky's (1963) theory of margin that posits a ratio of load and power in an adult learner's life. The theory of margin provides a framework to consider the real world context of the adult learner's life circumstances when designing instruction.

What better way to understand the external load of your participants' lives than to live within their community for an extended period of time?

The next best resource for this for India so far is Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days Episode 2 on Outsourcing.