VIDEO | Workplace Learning. A new collaboration tool from Facebook

What is the new Learning feature from Workplace by Facebook?

More and more of our clients are talking to us about the use of Facebook Workplace in their organisations as a channel to support their employee engagement and internal communications. And with the recent unveiling of the new Learning functionality from Facebook, I wanted to explore the feature, some of its benefits and hopefully inspire you to try it for yourself.

Learning is a group specific function which allows you to create new content containers called ‘learning units’ within a specific group. A learning unit will typically include posts and quizzes that are based on a common theme or subject. They are bundled together in that unit and sit inside the group. What’s different about these posts is that when employees engage with them, they can leave a mark to say that that’ve been ‘done’ – that they’ve been acknowledged or read and you can monitor this activity in the backend of the platform.

Learning posts

Learning posts are just like regular posts. They can include all the usual rich media you’d expect, like gifs, animation and video as well as check ins and @ mentions but the key difference is that additional step you can take to show an action has been taken. When an employee sees a learning post, they can interact in all the usual ways, such as liking, commenting and sharing, but they can also now click the ‘done’ button and acknowledge that it’s been completed.

Learning quizzes

A quiz is a new content type for Workplace and seems to be exclusive to these Learning Units. A quiz can be set up with one or multiple correct answers in a multiple-choice style quiz. The twist here is that you can set a pass rate for each of the questions you include in your quiz. For example, I might have three or four multiple choice questions people can choose from and I might determine that 75%, or three, of the questions have to be answered correctly before the quiz is marked as complete.

So, with a learning post, an employee has to self-select the completion. With a quiz, you have to set a few hoops for people to jump through in order for the task to be marked as ‘done’.

What’s key is that the admin of the group can go into the backend of the platform, look at those learning units and see what kinds of pass and completion rates there are within the group. You can see this as a collective and you can also drill down and look at the data on an individual basis.

That’s a lot of explanation and theory. But how does this work in practice?

Learning units, an example

Let’s say that in your environment, you have a group specifically for your internal communications champions network (and if you don’t already have that then, you probably should). Within that group you could set up a learning unit to share best practice around crafting good communications for employee engagement.

One of those learning units could specifically be all about video content. The unit could contain posts, videos, infographics or top tips on how to create the best video content for their network. You could also include quizzes on the subject, including questions on things like lighting, frame rates or audio quality. By going into the admin console of the group you can see who in your network has looked at these resources, marked them as done and taken the quizzes. With this data, you can spot both gaps in understanding and see who really understands the subject and might make great mentors or teachers for other members of the group.

Using Learning units more widely

Of course, you could also apply these learning units to other IC objectives, such a new strategy roll out, creating resources and quizzes around some of those key highlights. Even, more logistically, if there’s a big office move, or the launch of a new procedure, you could share these resources with the organisation, see who’s read them, and also make the learning process a bit more fun using a quiz.

I’m excited to see IC teams take these learning modules and explore different ways to create compelling content for their audiences. I would say that a certain lack of sophistication means other learning and development platforms on the market don’t have too much to be afraid of. But this is free, exists in your Workplace environment already and is definitely worth exploring to see how it might level up some of the Internal comms and employee engagement stuff efforts in your organisation.