The Undeniable Connector

Ben Brooks, vice president and practice leader for human capital performance at risk management giant Marsh, knows colleagues need access to people and information to help them serve their clients. Sometimes this is through traditional training. Most often it’s far more.

Marsh University, which Brooks created with a hefty social media component, enables colleagues to connect to one another to learn. Along the way, they solve problems across continents as easily as if they worked down the hall from one another. The university’s motto, “at Marsh, everyone is a teacher,” makes transparent and accessible the incredibly diverse and deep industry expertise within the organization.

When an employee in Edinburgh shared information about IPO insurance in her blog post, another employee in Johannesburg commented that she was unaware Marsh offered this product, and she had met a prospect that week that could potentially use it. For a week, the two went back and forth on the site, asking one another questions and filling in details. That information is now available for everyone to learn from.

“We have all of the ingredients for success within the walls of our firm, but they are often on hard drives or in the gray matter of our colleagues,” said Brooks. “Marsh University is working to institutionalize that knowledge so it can be better leveraged and so we can recognize our thought leaders and content producers, the teachers everyone wants to learn from.”

The experience at Marsh flies in the face of people with a consuming belief that social business tools are a time-suck, a productivity waster and a general disruption to the excellent training programs their organizations carefully craft.

Those prone to abuse new social tools are likely those who were wasting our time standing in doorways updating us on last night’s dinner conversation or launching endless e-mail assaults. We waste time blaming technology for problematic hires or outdated organizational cultures.

But emerging social technologies can extend, widen and deepen our reach and our inherent desire to connect. They allow us to embrace the needs of changing workplace demographics and allow people of all ages to learn in ways that are comfortable and convenient for them.