Social learning, or how each employee's knowledge can benefit the whole company
Today, most people, when faced with a problem, search for it in their favorite search engine - Google - and consult the queries that mention it. Collective intelligence is structured and made freely available to every individual. What if, in your company, employees could benefit in the same way from each other's knowledge? Find out all our tips on corporate social networks.
The benefits of social learning for your company
Face-to-face training has its limits
When an employee encounters a problem at work, he or she can refer the matter to the HR (Human Resources) department to request training. But if it's a face-to-face training session, it won't be immediate. At best, it will be scheduled. And there's no guarantee that it will perfectly address the problem encountered. In the case of company-specific applications, an external speaker may not be able to provide a satisfactory answer, or at least not from the outset.
E-learning to personalize content
E-learning is a good solution to counter the disadvantages of face-to-face training. It's more immediate to implement, and the content can be customized. With software such as We Are Learning's EasyTeachR, companies can create their own training modules or online exercises. The social learning space dedicated to online training then enables the learning community to be promoted through exchanges. The aim is to offer learners a learning context as close as possible to their everyday working environment.
Social learning to capitalize on experience
Face-to-face and online training have their merits. However, they fail to capitalize on the knowledge community that forms the company. The problem faced by the employee may have been faced by others before him. How did they solve it? And how can their experience be passed on to the next generation? That's what forums are all about:
- The first person asks a question
- Someone answers it
- A third person asks the same question one day. He searches the forum and immediately gets the answer he needs.
Launch a rich, useful forum
Timely information
For the company, the benefits are real. Employees are able to find more immediate answers to their problems. And the system is a kind of self-service. Everyone can pick and choose what they need at any given moment. This is often more effective than transmitting content too far in advance. Let's say the company anticipates and offers training in view of problems employees might encounter later on. As the latter have not yet confronted the issues themselves, they are unlikely to be receptive to it. And the training effort will be in vain.
Reliability indices to corroborate content
The social aspect of the forum encourages reliability. Those who take the floor are aware that they will be read by their peers. Conversely, the responses or comments made by others can supplement or correct the information exchanged. A rating system can serve as an indicator of reliability. Or, like Wikipedia, the software can indicate when content has not yet been validated by a third party.
Game mechanics to encourage exchanges
The more entries the forum receives, the more answers it has to offer. If no one questions, answers or comments, the forum will be useless. Gamification is an excellent way to encourage participation. The company can reward the most active participants, by awarding virtual badges for example. Scores can also be marked, to enhance the relative performance of each participant and provide collective stimulation.
The solution for capitalizing on corporate knowledge
Beyond the practical and operational aspects, social learning enables individual skills to be collected and passed on within the organization.
The importance of transmission
A company's greatest asset is its human capital: the body of knowledge and know-how acquired by its employees. Passing on these skills is a key factor in the company's development. However, transitions are difficult to orchestrate, whatever the situation:
- retirement: to avoid a loss of know-how for the company
- maternity leave: to facilitate the training of the replacement, leaving him/her with all the required elements
- a new employee: to ensure a smooth handover to the previous employee.
In the eyes of customers and external contacts, these problems can undermine the company's credibility if they are visible.
More collaborative media
Tutorials or " topos " are often the subject of hours of work. Concocted upstream by the person leaving, they are discovered downstream by the person in charge. This time lag is far from optimal. And the successor rarely dares to contact his predecessor when he encounters a problem. What's more, procedures can sometimes be rigid and not regularly updated. They have been drawn up and passed on unilaterally. Those who use them are given too little encouragement to contribute with an annotation, a comment...
Social learning tools
Working with the right collaborative tools is a sine qua non for effective social learning in the workplace.
Electronic document management (EDM)
To make information sharing more interactive, your EDM needs to be dynamic. Your employees need to be able to exchange information in a contextualized way, so they can work together more effectively. During a handover, with document management software like Jalios Document System, it's much easier to leave annotations on documents than to concoct a single, arm's length document trying to cover everything.
The Enterprise Social Network (ESN)
The forum-type system is translated into a corporate social network. The aim is to centralize your company's internal exchanges, and even external exchanges with customers and suppliers, within a digital platform. The Jalios Digital Platform CSR application is even better suited to these collaborative and social methods, thanks to its exceptional functional coverage. More dynamic than an intranet, the aim is to encourage interaction. This Digital Workplace makes collaborative working more fluid, and it is in this sense that social learning contributes to your company's individual and collective efficiency.
A company is a pool of knowledge that social learning can help to develop and maintain. Both CSR and EDM systems are essential collaborative tools for mobilizing collective intelligence in the service of your company's development.
Article translated from French