Out of the shadows

“What apps do you recommend?”

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the workplace, this is a question I am being asked with increasing frequency.

And I don’t really like answering it. I mean, I have my faves, but they are my faves. What I find useful might prove useless for you. It all depends on the nature of your role and what you are endeavouring to do with your device.

So to better inform my answer to this question, I am crowdsourcing a list of favorite business apps. I can now point to a dynamically curated selection of apps that a range of other people find useful. The weight of numbers lends credibility to my recommendations.

While it’s early days yet, I’m not surprised to see Evernote streaking ahead. In just about every conversation I have with my peers about apps, the peppermint pachyderm rates a mention. It seems everyone is talking about the elephant in the room!

However, I am surprised by the listing currently in second place: Dropbox. I’m not surprised by the fact it’s listed as a favourite app – Dropbox is excellent! – but rather that it’s listed as a favourite business app.

You see, while Dropbox offers wonderful affordances in terms of cloud-based storage and retrieval, it’s (apparently?) not very secure. Despite its Help Center’s claim to the contrary, the internet is littered with warnings such as this one and IT departments tend to frown upon its use.

Nonetheless, people use it. A lot. For business.

I see this as a sign of the times. Employees are circumventing their company’s restrictive and frustrating IT policies with their own technology.

Now I must stress that I am neither an IT manager nor a security expert. I am not arguing one way or the other on whether this is right or wrong. What I am saying is that this is happening. Shadow IT is casting itself over the corporate landscape.

Consider the implications for the e-learning professional:

• Your employees expect to access information and resources on their own device – whatever make, model or operating system it may be.
• Your employees are watching YouTube videos and engaging in social media, even if those sites are blocked by the company.
• Your employees are participating in MOOCs, even if you disagree with their pedagogy.
• Your employees are playing games when they get bored or they need a break.
• Your employees are familiar with apps and they are using them.

The list goes on… You can try to suppress it – or embrace it.

Isn’t it time for your organisation’s e-learning to come out of the shadows?

Take the law out of compliance training

Compliance training is everyone’s favourite punching bag.

I deduce two main reasons for this:

1. It’s usually drop-dead boring, and
2. People don’t like being told what to do.

So we in the L&D department are put in the unenviable position of selling the unsellable to our colleagues. To do so, we typically resort to a couple of irreproachable messages:

1. It’s the law (so we have to do it), and
2. If we break the law, we could be fined, we could lose our licence to practise, and someone could even go to jail.

Both are valid reasons to do compliance training, but they shouldn’t be our primary drivers.

Confused? Let me explain by urging you to adopt a different perspective…

Take the law out of it

Imagine for a moment there was no such thing as compliance legislation; no regulatory agencies scrutinising your every move; no auditors to appease; no obligation whatsoever to do any compliance training of any kind. Would you still support it?

If your answer is “no”, I am astounded.

I can only infer that you don’t really care about:

• the health and safety of your employees
• the fair and equitable treatment of your colleagues
• the privacy and security of your customers

Even if you are devoid of ethics, another compelling argument exists in favour of compliance training…

It makes business sense

For example, what would happen if:

• your star performer slips on spilt coffee in the kitchen and breaks his collarbone?
• a perfectly qualified and experienced job applicant is rejected on the basis of her skin colour?
• absenteeism goes through the roof because the young ladies in the office are avoiding a sleazy manager?
• a fraudster in your admin team re-routes payments to his personal bank account?
• your contact centre provides a customer’s new phone number to her abusive ex-husband?
• a competitor finds a USB stick containing your company’s 5-year marketing plan?

I’ll tell you for free: your business will suffer.

So our gripe shouldn’t be about doing compliance training – it should be about doing it better.

Start by taking the law out of it. Then put it back in.