Communities of Practice and its importance

Discuss about the Monitor and Improve Learning Effectiveness.

1. The Communities of Practice has emerged to be an influential factor of the current management system in an organisation. Robert (2006) identifies CoPs as a key domain that supports knowledge creation. It acts as a source of competitive advantage for the modern business organisations. CoPs are an essential method of knowledge management to enhance intellectual capital by promoting knowledge exchange and continuous learning (Robert, 2006).  For example, the Australian Medical Association is considered as a group of professional medical experts who develop rules and regulations of medical practices in Australia. The primary role of the community is to enforce universal laws that must be followed by every medical practitioner in Australia.

Attending the conference held by the AMA provides the medical staffs with new knowledge and develops their skills. Furthermore, the conference held by the AMA is helpful is sharing thoughts and experience of the doctors and other medical practitioners. Hence, it can be seen that the networks of Communities of Practice help in sharing knowledge and enables the organisation with continuous development of its employee’s skills. Sharing of knowledge with the help of Communities of Practices improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisations by providing the staffs with a platform to share knowledge and learn new things through the exchange of experiences.

2. The project to decrease the carbon footprint of the organisation needs thorough planning to meet the realistic goals and targets. Breaking down the overall plan into particular steps can be evident for a successful outcome. In the meantime, workable plans for the large project must include environment-friendly steps that will identify the main agenda of the projects as well as the issues attached to the same. First of all, the workable plan must represent what the organisation is trying to accomplish through the large-scale project. According to the deliverables, efficient team members must be selected, and objectives must be listed (Monteserin & Amandi, 2013). Herein, training of the team members will be crucial so that each of the members of the team can play a successful role.

Being a team leader of the given project, setting up the convenient networks will be one of the challenging issues. Meanwhile, for the best of my knowledge, I will provide support, insight, information, resources and feedback to the team members to create a sustainable network throughout the project life. In this way, the senior team members can support the talented employees to utilise the resources for effective productivity (Sánchez, Sánchez, Collado-Ruiz, & Cebrián-Tarrasón, 2013). In case implementing the plan, interactions and exchange of concepts will be crucial making the potential stakeholders understand about the results of the proceedings.

3. Interstate conferences act as a pool of knowledge for the employees. It is important to note that an organisation is not capable of affording the fund of sending all employees to the interstate conferences to enhance their knowledge and practical skills. Therefore, selected and best employees of the organisation are sent to attend the regional conferences. The knowledge and learning gained from the conferences are useful for all employees and therefore, the person attending the interstate conference is asked to prepare a summary to share the knowledge with every member of the organisation.

Management of a project to decrease the carbon footprint

The procedure helps to judge the learning capability of the selected employees and share the knowledge with other employees who were unable to attend the interstate conferences due to lack of resources. Hence, it helps to meet the goals of gaining knowledge from the interstate conferences and passing the information to every employee of the organisation (Tuan, 2015). If an example is considered, it can be seen that the management level employee or higher level officials of a healthcare organisation attend the regional conferences organised by the Australia Medical Association to convey the information collected from the conference among the other medical practitioners in the organisation. Therefore, it can be said that it is an essential procedure of knowledge sharing and enhancing employees’ skills and experiences to develop organisational performance.

4. In order to facilitate the information, I will send a newsletter to every employee of the organisation working under my supervision. Along with that, meetings in the group will be arranged to avoid disruption to hospital operations and the project team will be selected on the basis of the performance of the employees (Watson, 2013). Employees with good performance and learning skills will be selected as a project team member. The team headed by me will be responsible for conducting personal interviews and training sessions for rest of the employees and contracted staffs. Finally, a feedback form will be provided to ensure that every member of the clinical department has gained the required information and knowledge to enhance the organisation’s performance.Learning is a fundamental part of an organisation. It helps to enhance the knowledge of an employee and develops the personal skills to improve organisational performance. Hence, knowing the preferred learning style of the employees is beneficial for a clinical manager to plan the training and development process (Jou & Liu, 2012). The preference of the employee’s learning style improves the efficiency of the Training and Development program and provides the organisation with better talent resources. Furthermore, the knowledge of the employees’ preferences can be helpful in organising the operations and plan the activities accordingly. Hence, it is important for a clinical manager to observe and understand the preference of the employees learning style to avoid unwanted situations and improve organisation’s performance.

5. In order to deal with the situation of business writing skills, significant support can be provided to an employee. In the given case, despite attempting the business writing skills course, the performance of Tim has seemed to be unsatisfactory. Being the project team leader, I will provide Tim with some basic knowledge of professional writing to improve his standards of writing business emails and letters. Herein, Tim must be guided to understand the audience and the professional format of sending emails. In addition to that, the composition and style of the writing will be a crucial factor for any business communication (Firch, Campbell, Lindsay, & Garner, 2010). Hence, by identifying the target audience, significant outline and flow of communication must be achieved within written communication. Along with that, Tim must be advised to utilise the Rhetorical Triangle method within the business emails to rectify the pitch of the message.

Apart from that, the structure of the business emails and concept of grammar must be cleared to develop standard business writing skills. As professionals have less time to read a business email, key points must be presented in a structured way to impress the recipient (Lawrence, 2012). Moreover, proofing of the text will be effective to deliver an error free message to a business counterpart. In this way, Tim must be guided to improve the standards in business writing skills.

6. Feedbacks have played a major role in learning programme to improve the skills and knowledge of the subordinates. Though some of the training facilitators have utilised the feedback sheets to note down the positive comments, effective feedback sheets must include the negative comments as well. For personal and professional learning and development programmes, negative comments can show the training facilitators what areas of an employee must be improved. Through the identification negative comments of the feedback sheets, a trainer can improvise within the learning programme to add new learning facilities. For example, if an employee has lacked communication skills, more knowledge and learning resources must be provided to him to improve his communication methods (Magrath, 2016). 

In order to create an influence on the project team members, participants must be nominated to share their pros and cons. Along with that, advanced knowledge learning techniques must be introduced on the basis of feedback sheets’ comments. As a project team leader, individual assessment of the team members will be effective to understand the level of performance and issues of the subordinates. Accordingly, innovative learning measures and training should be provided to the team members to create a high level of confidence.

References

Firch, T., Campbell, A., Lindsay, D., & Garner, D. (2010). On Developing The Writing Skills Course For Accounting Students. AJBE, 3(4). https://dx.doi.org/10.19030/ajbe.v3i4.414

Jou, M. & Liu, C. (2012). Application of semantic approaches and interactive virtual technology to improve teaching effectiveness. Interactive Learning Environments, 20(5), 441-449. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2010.509632

Lawrence, C. (2012). Integrating Writing and Negotiation Skills. Business Communication Quarterly,65(2), 54-66. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/108056990206500205

Magrath, C. (2016). A Conceptual Framework for Facilitator Training to Expand Communication-Skills Training among Veterinary Practitioners. Journal Of Veterinary Medical Education, 33(1), 108-110. https://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jvme.33.1.108

Monteserin, A. & Amandi, A. (2013). A reinforcement learning approach to improve the argument selection effectiveness in argumentation-based negotiation. Expert Systems With Applications,40(6), 2182-2188. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.10.045

Robert, H. (2006). Webster’s New World Robert’s rules of order. New York: Hungry Minds.

Sánchez, J., Sánchez, Y., Collado-Ruiz, D., & Cebrián-Tarrasón, D. (2013). Knowledge Creating and Sharing Corporate Culture Framework. Procedia – Social And Behavioral Sciences, 74, 388-397. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.03.029

Tuan, L. (2015). From corporate social responsibility, through entrepreneurial orientation, to knowledge sharing. The Learning Organization, 22(2), 74-92. https://dx.doi.org/10.1108/tlo-09-2014-0052

Watson, I. (2013). Applying knowledge management. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann.