tessello: A Review of Brightwave’s Total Learning System

As an organization, Tescohas a lot to be proud of with our online customer experience. Tesco.com remainsone of the best-benchmarked retail supermarket online shopping experiences andthis has now been replicated at Tesco Bank where online plays a key role in ourcustomer service proposition with a new banking website and leading-edge mobilebanking app. Feedback from customers is already positive.

Looking at how wedeliver our customer proposition has got me thinking about how we can replicatethat internally for our colleagues. In short my ambition as head of Tesco Bank’sorganizational capability and development is to give our colleagues anexperience as good as the one we give our customers. Digital is no longer atechnology for organizations to implement, instead it’s very much become a mindset on how people operate and behave. We need to consider how we provide all ofour colleague services in a modern and innovative manner that replicates theexperiences they have every day in their normal lives.

The area we haveinvested the most effort in making things digital has been learning, and a bigpart of guaranteeing that great learner experience is choosing the right technology.For us, when it came to finding a social-learning platform (that could also doa whole lot more), this meant Brightwave’s total learning system tessello. Ourinitial target group was made up of graduates, and tessello was personalized forus as the Tesco Bank GradCloud.

xAPI technology

tessello is one of thefirst learning systems to be powered by the Experience API, or xAPI, and as afan of new tech this was one of its biggest appeals to me. It solves a problemthat learning and development (L&D) has had for years, namely finding a wayof making informal learning work harder for the organization. We all know mostlearning happens informally, minute by minute, as it’s needed in the workflow. Whatmakes Tesco Bank great is the degree to which our team learns and exchangesideas with each other. But all the vital skills and knowledge acquired likethis has historically been confined to the individual—transforming informallearning into organizational knowledge and general best practice has alwaysbeen difficult. tessello’s xAPI integration suggests a way to make it easy.

If I see somethinginteresting or useful I just click a button on my web browser and that informallearning is instantly saved in my personal learning record store. From there Ican share it out with my team, my manager, or my colleagues anywhere in theworld. Of course this still only works for learning at my desk, but ourlearners can connect with tessello anywhere through the mobile app—anything Isee or hear while I’m going about my day, I can snap with the app and save asxAPI data. Suddenly, I can bring any learning resources or experiences Iencounter inside the organization and share them instantly with the rest of mysocial-learning community, turning those informal learning insights into realvalue-added assets.

Social learning

We wanted a platform thatwould support the onboarding of new graduates into our business and allow themto learn and share their experiences with graduates and colleagues already joiningin the business ahead of them. The social element was the primary driver forour initial selection of tessello, and this was key because we wanted membersof our Academy to learn from each other and develop a learning culture—and aworking culture—where innovation and collaboration are as natural as they areeffective.

In tessello our learnersare automatically assigned to a collective community when they register. Thelearners can then be reassigned to smaller sub-groups, based on their role,department, or current project. In these groups, members can share and discuss learningresources and new information, and through that discussion, validate them. Ifsomething is useful and provokes a discussion it’s impossible to miss in thecommunity discussion chain, so the learner’s social fear-of-missing-out meansthey’ll check it out for themselves, and key new data and insights filterthrough the organization quickly.

Community interactionsin tessello take the form of nested chains where individual learners share learningresources with the group for discussion. Other members of the community canre-share, like, and comment on their fellow learners’ experiences in a way thatis immediately familiar to them from the social media they use outside theworkplace.

In tessello theseinteractions are more than just social window dressing—it’s a gamified systemof rewards and incentives which has a real benefit in driving learnerengagement. Learners are awarded points for the resources they share, driving theircompetitive edge, and giving them a shared space to connect and belong to a communityaligned with shared goals and values. For a community of learners such as newgrads, tapping into their ambitions to stand out and be seen as an expert is ahuge motivator and undoubtedly encourages smarter learning and knowledgeexchange. For us, tessello’s leaderboard has become a regular offlinediscussion point, generating micro-rivalries to see who can find the coolestinformal resource or job aid!

We use our GradCloudtessello for onboarding and induction of new graduate talent. Those accepted onthe program are given access to the platformbefore they even take up their roles. One of our learners, solely through therelationships made on the GradCloud, actually found a new home through a fellowlearner as they relocated to take up their new position! For me, that kind ofreal-world impact really puts the social into social learning.

Collaborative learning

In addition to thegeneral community space, tessello is also configured to allow learners to joinsub-groups on a dedicated challenge or skill. These are where the realnitty-gritty happens: it lets learners really get into a particular project andshare ideas to find new solutions to old problems. This can happen at any time,and from anywhere, and empowers learners to simultaneously develop asindividuals and as effective teams.

Structured Learning Pathways

There is an obviousdanger with learner-led development that the learning they’re bringing in tothe organization can stray from the core mission—or that colleagues who aren’tpredisposed to learning socially or informally can be left behind. I think thisis one place where tessello gets the balance right. Within all the bright andfunky social networking features there are solid measures of organizational oversightensuring the learning is aligned to both long- and short-term goals anddelivers value to the whole enterprise.

First of all there’sthe useful Curator role, where the organization’s subject matter experts (SMEs)are assigned from within the community to validate, refresh, and promote theinformation and learning resources that are most essential to our coreobjectives, and remove irrelevant or outdated material. Secondly there’s theStructured Learning Pathway (SLP)—this lets managers or trainers design bespokelearning programs at the group or individual level, using a mix of formal andinformal resources, experiential learning, face-to-face training, and practicalproject-based assessments. SLPs can also be enhanced by the Coach function,where a manager or trainer can use the platform for tracking progress andgiving real-time one-to-one feedback and mentoring.

User experience

Obviously tessello hasa great-looking user interface that people are comfortable using, but currentlyit wouldn’t be right to call it the perfect platform. As was widely discussed atDevLearn this year (I didn’t go, sadly, but kept a close eye on the backchannel—maybenext year!), questions around analytics and Big Data are intrinsically linkedto the opportunities afforded by the xAPI. A logical next step is the need tooutput and analyze a greater variety of statistical reports and gain insightinto learner behaviors from informal learning statements. For a social platform,it lacks certain features such as a learner-to-learner direct-messagingfunction, and it should offer better integration with other software platformswe use throughout the organization. We are expanding with further tesselloinstances shortly, so this is a particular challenge that we will soon have tomeet.

After over 20 years inthe corporate learning space, and seeing many new ideas that would revolutionizeand change the way we learn all fall flat on their faces, I do believe that now,more than any other time before, we are on the edge of a change.

The days of learningand development departments churning out the “same old, same old” have to stopand the bigger question for me is, “What does the future for learning anddevelopment indeed hold?”

For what it’s worth,my opinion suggests that it will all come down to providing the best possible colleagueexperience, learning from the consumer and external customer world. Colleaguesdon’t care about learning and development, they care about getting on andhaving a career. The quicker L&D functions learn that, and focus on what thecolleague needs rather than their own internal objectives, the better thechance we can achieve sustainable change.

AmI doing what I can in my role to make my colleagues’ L&D exciting andproductive? Are we engaging our learners, helping them collaborate andinnovate, and turning them into brand advocates who give 100 percent to ourmission? I can’t say I’m there yet, but I know that a lot of the successes I’vehad to date are down to using the right mix of learning and HR technologies,and I’m satisfied tessello is one with a lot more to offer my colleagues yet.