Getting people to use learning resources in the company library can be tricky, Kathleen Miller-Buettner and Susan Hayley-Gates say.
Their library has books, videos and audio tapes on communication skills, management skills, balancing work and home lives, and dozens of other topics.
But, as in many organizations, the materials once went mostly unused.
To encourage corporate library use—and learning—the training department initiated a TOM (theme of the month) Club. Membership is free. Each month has a topical theme – effective feedback, industry information and the like. Trainers, however, don’t disclose what the month’s theme is. Instead they post clues throughout the office and via email on the first day of each month. Employees guess the theme, placing their guess in one of the special TOM Club raffle boxes around the workplace.
On the 10th of each month, trainers collect the boxes. The names of participants who correctly identified the theme go into another box, and a winner is drawn. That person receives a prize.
For the rest of the month, material on the theme of the month is posted throughout the office, and a library listing of related materials is published. Seminars, computer-based tests, and games during the month reinforce the theme.
Secret “TOM VPs” randomly ask employees what the theme is. Those who know receive a gift certificate to a local bookstore.
“We recently developed an ASK TOM! feature,” Hayley-Gates said, “in which employees can send messages to the TOM Club asking for more information on a topic. This is done via the email system. Trainers field the questions.”
Enthusiasm about the TOM Club has raised awareness of learning resources to use at their convenience—and they’re using them.
This tip is a Classics Corner tip from a past issue of Bob Pike’s Creative Training Techniques newsletter. It was submitted by Miller-Buettner who was a training manager with PPOM managed healthcare and Hayley-Gates who was a training coordinator at PPOM at the time this was originally published. To subscribe to the newsletter, go to www.CreativeTrainingTech.com.
