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TELUS EMBRACES SOCIAL LEARNING

T ELUS is a Canadian telecommunications company that has been around for a
century, and it wants to ensure that every Canadian is connected to the rest of the
world, whether that connection is through wireless devices, the Internet, television,
or traditional telephone lines. The company has 12.7 million customer accounts.
Providing superior service is an important corporate goal. Management believes that good
teamwork and employee learning are vital for achieving this goal. Until recently, most employee
learning at TELUS took place in formal classroom settings outside the company. Much of what
employees learned depended on knowledge presented by instructors, and this learning method
was expensive. Employees would be better off learning from each other’s expertise, manage-
ment concluded. Moreover, 40 percent of the TELUS workforce was expected to retire within
the next 10 years, making it essential for the company to find multiple ways of sharing and
preserving employee experience and knowledge.
The company decided to focus on making team member education more “continuous,
collaborative, and connected” through informal and social learning, using mentoring, coaching,
job rotations, videos, blogs, and wikis. TELUS set a 2010 learning budget of $21 million, 40 per-
cent of which was for informal and social learning and 60 percent for formal learning. (The year
before, formal learning had accounted for 90 percent of the firm’s $28.5 million learning budget.)
To support the new learning initiative, TELUS harnessed the capabilities of Microsoft
SharePoint Server 2010, which provides team members with a single point of entry to shared
knowledge within the company and the ability to search all the company’s learning assets simul-
taneously. TELUS used the SharePoint MySites feature to enable team members to create their
own Web pages that describe their areas of expertise and special skills. Team members are able to
see their positions and those of others in the organizational hierarchy, connect with colleagues,
and establish informal groups with other people with similar skills. An Expert Search capability
provides ranked search results identifying TELUS employees with expertise in specific areas.
MySites also offers blogging tools for team members to build their own blogs and contribute to
those of others. Through these blogs, a team member can locate an expert, discuss his or her
experiences, share advice, and find the answers to questions without having to take a class or
interrupt a colleague.
TELUS used SharePoint to develop team sites called My Communities, where project teams,
departments, and other groups can work together and share documents and other content. They
are able to create categories for
classifying and tagging user-
generated content. TELUS Tube
allows team members to post
and view user-generated video
of their accomplishments on
the job or questions to ask col-
leagues. Over 1,000 videos have
been posted. A new learning
management system working
closely with SharePoint Server
2010 enables team members
to track and display the formal
learning courses they have
taken as well as the courses
other team members have
taken.
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