Social learning

The traditional training course can only teach you so much. Steve Cassidy explores a different way to upskill employees

“Identifying the hidden knowledge in your business, and helping it to spread, can be hugely empowering for the staff”

I thought social learning was what kids do at school?

To an extent, yes, but it’s not just about getting along with one’s peers. Social learning means acquiring any sort of skill by observing and interacting with others – in contrast to the PowerPoint-driven learning that one often experiences on training courses. Social learning can be as simple as asking questions of colleagues, but it also includes implicit learning, where we absorb ideas, processes and values without intentionally setting out to learn them, or even necessarily realising we’re doing so.

That sounds fine, but we can’t just cross our fingers and hope that employees will acquire key skills purely by osmosis...

Then you need to point them in the right direction. There’s an old saying that there are probably six people in your business who really know how things work. In these days of small, agile organisations the number might be lower. The pandemic has helped expose the existence of such hidden knowledge structures – because it becomes a lot harder to muddle through when the person who knows isn’t present to provide nudges at the right time. Identifying the hidden knowledge in your business, and helping it to spread, can be hugely empowering for the staff .

Are you saying we need everyone to spend more time talking?

Ideally the endgame would be the opposite: to equip them to know and do the right things, even when working with no supervision. To get there, though, you might need to reappraise how you relate to your workforce, and how you encourage them to relate to each other. Social learning isn’t just a reaction to homeworking: as an idea, it’s been gaining momentum since long before the pandemic arrived, in reaction to the increasingly impersonal, computerdriven methods of formal training.

Will social learning replace the old top-down training methods?

Only the most zealous evangelist would suggest that. There’s a strong argument to be made that we wouldn’t have brain surgeons, network designers or brilliant guitarists without an element of book learning and social isolation. Social learning has some absolutely spot-on subjects – things such as how to set and unset the factory fire alarm – but, like every new idea, it has its limits.

How can I tell a suitable training topic from an unsuitable one?

Social learning advocates are keen on subjects that bubble up organically – topics your staff are already talking about, which only need a stamp of approval and a bit of a spruce-up to become the basis of a little socially managed procedures library. Indeed, the conversation about what makes a good or bad social learning subject is itself a good social learning subject.

Isn’t there a risk that people won’t want to admit their ignorance?

Embarrassment can be a powerful inhibitor: I recall a study that found benefit claimants were likely to understate their needs when talking to a person, compared to when filling in a computer-based questionnaire. There are also some things that can’t be picked up by hanging around with the right people – think coding, for example. What you’re ideally looking for is to match the delivery method to the subject and to the individual.

Is there a best-practice rule book for all of this?

So far, it seems nobody has found a way to draw all the threads of the different ways of learning together into a single product. One thing you can do, though, is set a policy that makes the boundaries clear between work and personal presence on social media. You probably don’t want your programmers spending their days chatting about books or sport – but allowing them to exchange ideas with other programmers might be the best investment you could make.