My company has a decentralized training function (individual department managers are responsible for their training) with a small centralized training group that focuses mostly on the LMS, etc. We've realized that information sharing is really poor amongst Departments. Do you have any suggestions as to how to improve information sharing related to training best practices, etc.

In general, how do you increase information sharing in your companies?

Thanks!

In one organization in which I worked an after-work "social hour" at a local drinking establishment did the trick. Really.

Are they in different locations?

We post information on our company portal underneath the Training link.

Hi,
Another way is to wet everybody's appetities by making things competetive.

I have done this in the past (in multi-site companies) by:
1. Sharing training metrics with all departments concerned - so it becomes evident who is sending folks to training (and who is actually turning up)etc.
2. Having a "Best Training Payoff of the month/quarter" story. Showing how participation in a training event really impacted performance in both an expected/unexpected manner. The nice thing about this approach is that it forces you to ring around and stay in touch, ask good questions of the managers - and so other training requirements/outcomes flow naturally into the conversation.

All the best, Mike Collins.

One of the best methods is to take advantage of recent development in technology. We had a similar situation in a UK corporation. There where many departments each serving different needs such as government agencies, defence, space technologies and so on. There was not much communication between the people three isles down the floor lets aside between different departments.

One solution which started to change the situation was a knowledge share system. This was a wiki-style web authoring system where people could simply put their ideas online and expect others to comment on them and give feedback. These systems are however slow to start and you need to give your employees a lot of incentive, such as you have X hours per month to spend on this and so on. Now this method is still not the same as getting people to talk face-to-face, but it lets employees know who else can be interested in what you are interested. When people share an interest they automatically start to get to know each other more and communicate.

So the strategical objective of this exercise should be to get people together to talk more and create online documented discussion for future, not yet another computer-based activity to do.

The result: it helps, but its not enough. As someone mentioned above you also need to regularly take them out for a drink/food/social activity. It's amazing how people open up when the focus is on the most basic needs of humans, and we all know what they are. ;-)

It's quite a simple solution, but unfortunately most in management don't understand its importance.