Knowledge Management: From Brain to Business (PDF 5.5 - Asian ...

employee must be open to learning in order for this community to work. It is then the
responsibility of the organization or its leadership to provide each individual all the means
necessary for him or her to be able to interact and tap into the various resources needed to
have the information the employee requires and to take responsibility for what he or she
does within the organization. How much freedom we give employees to participate in this
community will determine how involved they wish to become.
Let us start with this key foundation. The issue is developing an associate or employee who
understands the benefits associated with learning, which ultimately leads to your
organization becoming a learning organization. I think we will all agree that becoming and
being a learning organization is essential to success in today’s rapidly changing world. This
was a concept introduced a number of years ago by our friend Peter Senge. He says “the
organisations that will truly excel in the future will be the organisations that discover how to
tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organisation.”
Note that it must be at all levels and it is about nurturing people to become focused on
learning, changing and growing. As an example, we started a five-year program some years
ago for our plant operators to help them to achieve a certain level of performance and
improve their job attributes in order to be more effective in their job. Some people initially
did not understand or see the importance of the training, but as they saw their colleagues
who went to the training moving up in their jobs ahead of them, they began to see the
difference the program made and this is the kind of learning culture that we want to build
because we can only progress if each individual has that learning mindset.
In essence, we are talking about how we make each individual and ultimately the entire
organization more adaptable. What do we mean by adaptable? This means that the
individual is willing to learn and grow, and to recognize that his or her role within the
company will necessarily have to change to meet the needs of the environment. And it has
to start with a willingness on the part of management to make real investments, both in
terms of money and people time in formalized training within the organization. Without the
corporate focus on training, efforts to create a learning culture are merely hollow words. It
has to come from the top.
You need to be smart about combining the different learning technologies. For example,
John Stitt, one of our tissue experts, ensures that whenever he plans to conduct an
instructor-led training course on tissue making for our sales or technical people, that these
trainees first go through some form of PC or CD-based training which provides them with
basic information that they need to know before they come for the face-to-face training
session, thus resulting in more productive learning when they come together for the actual
training.
Hence, we try to give our associates a well-rounded and diverse set of learning opportunities,
and we make use of various delivery options to extend their access to learning. Our online
Learning Center enables our associates to take courses anytime, anywhere. We must expand
access to learning so that it is available anytime, anywhere through multiple delivery options
(web-based, classroom, CD, web-casting, university access.)
Translating materials to our people’s native languages is also important. At Buckman, we
have even moved away from using formal translators from the outside, to the use of our
own people so that the translation is as close as possible to our people’s day-to-day
language.
We are implementing a learning management system, which includes training catalogues and
training records, and this is managed by our Learning Center team. Another part of the
whole learning culture process is being able to bring everyone to the same level. We have
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