A Partner’s Point of View: Workday Learning and User-Generated Content

(Guest blogger Sean Campion is vice president, Workday HCM Global Services at Appirio, and leads Appirio’s Global Workday Practice.)

To deliver an exceptional worker experience, it’s important to provide consumer-grade tools and technologies in the workplace. When you embrace the idea that employees need workplace technologies that are as good as the technologies they use in their lives as consumers, you eliminate barriers that stand in the way of better serving customers. At Appirio, we call this relationship between a great worker experience and a great customer experience the Virtuous Cycle.

That’s why here at Appirio, we’re excited about Workday Learning, which enables workers to tap into the education they need, whenever and wherever they need it. And just like the consumer technologies they use every day, Workday Learning empowers workers to contribute content and share insights with colleagues in real time through user-generated content (UGC).

As a Workday Services Partner, we hear from customers that they’re excited about Workday Learning and its ability to empower their people by enabling them to share and learn from one another via UGC. If you’re not familiar with the concept of UGC, it’s time to learn more.

User-generated content lets employees share their knowledge by creating learning content for others to consume. The best way to think of it is that by supporting UGC, you’re making it easier for your organization to share and retain critical knowledge that helps people get better at their jobs, better serve customers, and ultimately drive business growth. Many of your employees are de facto experts in certain areas, but may lack the time or means to share that information with coworkers. And if and these experts move on from your company, they may take with them knowledge that was never captured for the next generation of workers.

In addition, with UGC your organization is no longer bound by the bandwidth of your learning team to meet your employees’ content demands. With the proper procedures and incentives in place, you can tap into your wider organization to grow and tailor your learning content to the needs of the organization.

Still, the concept of UGC can be scary for some. With Workday Learning, UGC is not an all-or-nothing proposition.  The extent to which an organization creates approvals or guidelines is up to them.

For example, in Workday Learning you can target content creation rights to your organization’s subject matter experts, and then expand UGC as it makes sense. If your organization decides a review process is important, you can leverage Workday’s business process framework to put a review and approval process in place, and establish access rights to various content based on roles.

As you plan for UGC, another consideration is the longevity of your content. You may want to preserve some UGC for years to come, such as interviews with subject matter experts, conducted in a studio setting, on the core competencies of your business. Other UGC may be short videos on topics that are helpful and relevant that some employees care for now, but may not matter so much a year down the road. In the latter instance, you could rely on employee ratings of the videos to allow more popular content to filter to the top—a self-selection process that leaves it up to viewers to decide what fits the bill.

The options and approaches are limitless, depending on the comfort level, need, and learning strategy of your organization. What’s important is that Workday Learning provides a mobile-first, consumer-grade approach to learning and knowledge sharing, and has the ability to recommend content based on an employee’s preferences, preferred topics, and the way in which they interact with the application itself. It’s an incredibly innovative approach to learning, and we’re thrilled to partner with Workday to bring this modern platform to global enterprises.