Hello, I am Annelien, the driving force behind our blogs. Or did you think that every month a blog magically appeared on our website? Unfortunately, that is not true. I can proudly say that I was, and am, responsible for managing our blogs. But something is about to change, and I would like to explain why.
Managing blogs @ TLH
Before I explain how I managed our monthly blogs, I will tell you how that task fell upon me. The Learning Hub does not have a dedicated team that manages our website, social media etc. Each year, everyone choses one to three RACI-tasks. A RACI-task is an organizational task that you do besides your daily client tasks. We have colleagues that manage our social media, that think about how we could improve our learning culture, … One of those tasks, is managing our TLH blogs. And I chose that task. Since May of 2022 I made sure that every month there was a blog on our website.
It might surprise you, but managing our blogs is a tricky job. It requires good planning and communication with everyone in The Learning Hub. At the beginning of each year, I supply a planning that tells everyone when it is time for their team to write a blog. Every week I made sure to check the planning and status of each blog. If something deviated from the schedule, I was there to point out to my colleagues. This approach got me the nickname ‘Pitbull’, and I am very proud of it.
To make sure that the workload between the teams is equally spread, I looked at the size of each team. For example, we have Team Excellent, they are our LMS (Learning Management System) experts. Their team consists of eight people. But we also have Team Outstanding, one of our content creation teams. They are a team of three people. So, with that in mind, I decided to make the larger teams write three blogs and the smaller teams two. And with five teams (two large teams and three smaller teams) we could fill a year with monthly blogs.
Reconsider what is normal
At the beginning everyone, including me, was very excited to make our blogs a success. But after one year, it became clear that writing a blog was not easy to fit in our way of working with sprints. Sometimes a team was too busy with client tasks, so writing a blog was not top priority. Furthermore, after one year it was harder to think of a topic one could write about.
After some thinking and talking to colleagues, I thought about the changes I could make on our blogs. During our team meeting in June, I proposed my ideas and had some great feedback. Afterwards it was decided, by mutual agreement, that this summer I would write our last monthly blog. But we will not leave you hanging! In the four remaining months we will re-share a blog from our top four most-read blogs. In the new year, we then launch our new approach.
What about the future?
By now you will be wondering what is going to change. Will we continue writing blogs? Well, I can say that the answer to that question is: YES! But we plan to post them quarterly instead of monthly. That gives us more breathing space and time to write blogs that are more responsive to the moment. And again, with five teams, you can expect blogs about a variety of topics. So, there will be something for everyone.
But what about the other months you might think. Well behind the screens, we are working on something we call a ‘media library’. You should think of it as a digital library where you can find testimonials, interesting articles, learning resources, etc. The remaining months we will point out an interesting item in our media library via our social media channels.
So, there is a lot of change ahead, but you will still be able to read blogs on our website, albeit a little less often. I am a bit nervous and curious about the new approach but am confident it will work out well! I hope you enjoy reading our blogs in the future.
Until writing,
Annelien
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