Posted by The wait is finally over! Day 1 of the ATD International Conference and Exposition (ICE) 2015 began yesterday on May 17 with several concurrent sessions keeping the attendees engaged. While there were a diverse range of topics being discussed, the common thread running through all was – How to make learning more effective and learners happier.
After the International Orientation which ended at 11:00 am, Rick Lozano, a Learning Guru at Rackspace Hosting, enthralled the audience with his insights on how to bring in more energy and passion in people toward their job to create sustainable engagement. “Engagement is not about satisfaction. If you want satisfaction, you can put in a bunch of video games, slides, a gym and plenty of other fun stuff. But just having a cool place where you do your work isn’t enough to get people engaged”, he said while emphasizing the importance of emotional connection and psychological commitmentas necessary ingredients to build trust and thereby engagement within employees. This requires a proactive role by everyone and not just the HR. Unlike the current prevalent situation in companies where creating engagement is considered HR’s responsibility, engagement must be a part of every conversation with our managers, who must help us to find out what turns us on and how we are doing. If we create an environment where everybody has the power to make some decisions, we create a workplace where people not only learn and survive; they thrive.
Another session by Larry Israelite addressed the hot current topic of “crowdsourcing”. Learning organizations seek the help of Subject Matter Experts to develop content, but it has its own set of challenges especially higher turnaround time.
To see the principle of crowdsourcing in action, Larry Israelite asked us to make a test together using an online tool from Smarterer. The 200 attendees created a quiz with questions related to different categories (trends, movies, hair-bands) in “the 80s”. Then we corrected the test questions that other people had written –within about 5 minutes, we had a test of 300 questions, signed-off by over 100 people.
Dick Ruhe talked about “The happiness advantage” – the notion that happy people get better results and attrition goes down. He discussed 6 interesting principles besides this, that we need to bear in mind if we want intrinsic motivation and increased engagement.
Our team from Origin Learning is exhibiting at ATD 2015 to showcase some of our award winning solutions in e-learning, m-learning and social learning. Visit us in Exhibit Hall – 102 and let us show you how we can help you make learning fun, engaging and effective.
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