Andi Campbell of LAZ Parking gave a highly entertaining and informative presentation called “Building Your Company Tribe: Engaging Employees through Online Collaboration.” In this presentation, she discussed the working climate of LAZ Parking, how they distributed training to 1,000s of employees across the nation, and their learning platform.
Campbell began by discussing the work climate of LAZ Parking. LAZ Parking is a professional parking company focused on quality service to both clients and employees. They believe in positive motivation throughout the company through group hugs, standing ovations, and raves. Campbell was entrusted to cultivate this culture in its learning environment and she opted for social learning. As she noted, social learning has been successful because of culture and trust. To begin, she first had to understand her organization.
LAZ Parking starting point
At LAZ Parking, they develop managers from within. They, therefore, believe communication and setting expectations is important. They are a learning organization. What she realized is that employees do not go to training and come out learned, it has to be ongoing training.
Because their employees do not have access to computers, they had to rely on mobile learning. They created 2 to 30 minute courses using Adobe Captivate. They created a catalog of these short courses, some of videos came from YouTube and TED. They also do online training and blended training, and solicit content from the field—90% of content is voluntary.
Social Learning
LAZ Parking are using a program called Tribe Social for their social learning platform. She noted that they have two LAZ tribes:
- LAZ Nation Online Tribe
- LAZ Parking Manager Tribe
The social learning platform is part of their pull content strategy. The learning management system is part of the push content strategy.
Campbell talked in length about the LAZ Parking Manager Tribe. This tribe is to support a cohort in online training. Each week, the managers have a weekly topic to discuss. Managers are tasked to go find information and share it, e.g., find a leadership video, find a checklist, etc. They have a deadline through the ten-week course for each Monday. Homework is an essential part of the course. Campbell recommended that when creating a course, create a requirement that learners must engage online.
Learning Management System
Campbell also talked briefly about their LMS. It is called Exceed LMS also by Intellum. With this LMS, they can build a simple course with one item or develop an entire learning path.
I walked away from this presentation with a number of ideas that I plan to leverage for University of Wyoming Extension. For example, I plan to develop a catalog of short mlearning-type videos leveraging the idea of thin slicing. Additionally, I plan to work more in Moodle to develop short courses. I also plan to create more with Adobe Captivate, I have heard a number of positive things throughout this particular ASTD-ICE conference.
