Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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Elearning! American Express Makes 'Surround-Sound' Learning own various pieces of information, mak- ing it confusing to recipients. Several pilot projects that could solve American Express has 60,000 employees operating in 30 proprietary countries, 130 total countries worldwide. It serves 89 million credit card customers annually, ranks No. 1 in customer service according to JD Powers & Associates — and invests in employee and customer community building. While the financial industry has been hard hit, American Express grew its net income 90 percent in 2010. The company's learning model is two- pronged, one effort for its everyday employee and one for its 10,000 people leaders around the globe. Social learning is fairly new at AmEx. But it seems to be working. "The goal of our social learning initia- tives is trying to extend learning beyond just a classroom event or a Web-based program — to really make it a learning experience," says CLO Craig DeWald. "It's trying to create a surround-sound of learning for our Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers." The whole concept of social learning at AmEx is driven by tools. "We're starting to build tools that enable employees to pull and filter what they need or not need, based on their role, locale and career objectives," DeWald explains. "We're creating channels of information in our learning portal from which employees can choose their fields of interest. As new con- tent comes into the channel, there's a trig- ger that allows them to filter the informa- tion overload, and it allows them to nar- row it down so they get what they need. That social element to our learning pro- gram is also trying to replicate what people do outside of work, like picking certain RSS feeds on their home computers." Filtering information is a top priority at American Express, which has a fairly decentralized set of learning organiza- tions. They all commonly send out their that problem are in the works, including portal revisions. "Behind the scenes, we can operate as we've always done," DeWald notes, " but the employee experience should make things easy to find so they're not digging around our intranet. The pilot portal is tied into e-mail, so if there's something new coming into a particular channel, it's signaled though an e-mail message. Mobile learning is a new experience for executives, who don't tend to sit in front of computers all day. "What we're attempting is to move knowl- edge dissemination into a more natural flow of how people work every day, anyway. It is what people have asked for, and they love it." EXECUTIVE LEARNING Because AmEx's front-line team leaders sit in so many countries, social learning pro- grams can potentially connect them, thereby driving best-practice sharing and information exchange. "There's a lot of intelligence around our organization, and there are pockets of things going on that people don't know about, and there are experts that others aren't aware of," says DeWald. "So we want to move out of a content creation mode into a connecting mode. We're trying to enable the whole organization to be learners and teachers together, at the same time capturing that ongoing continuous kind of learning, mov- ing from a learning event toward that 'sur- round-sound' learning experience." Mobile learning is a new experience for American Express executives. "We're just starting to drive learning to Blackberry phones for our audience of executives who don't tend to sit in front of their computers all day," DeWald notes. "We've just begun sending targeted arti- cles about topics that are relevant and important to the strategy of the company. It'll provide the kind of education that will help people shape how they think about these strategies and bring an exter- nal perspective to the strategy." At this point, the mobile learning expe- rience is an experiment. The first obstacle has been trying to understand the learning habits of corporate executives and — per- haps in the future — the company's large cadre of sales people. "We've got a six-month pilot going on right now," DeWald notes. "We can track clicks, so we can see if that's a platform that will work for our executives. We have hopes that, in the future, we'll be able to expand upon it." Early feedback seems to indicate that the execs like the new approach much better than the traditional classroom/Webinar format. It has been especially helpful dur- ing the economic recession. "In 2009, we did a lot of helping leaders through the change," says DeWald. "Instead of rolling out programs that we couldn't and didn't want to afford at the time, we started using leaders in 15- to 18- minute videos, and people loved it. "In the future, we really need to drive and accelerate this approach, because it's meeting the flexibility needs of employees and the business. It's not about scheduling people off for a one- or two-day session, which is rough. It's more load-leveling. Having bite-size smaller chunks seems to be working for everyone, and we're getting great comments from employees and lead- ers, because it's making their lives easier." May / June 2011 23