Building A Culture Of Collaborative Learning
Before we dive into how you can build a culture of collaborative learning with 70 20 10, here's an explanation of what the model is. The model states that:
- 70% of learning is experiential, which happens through completing daily tasks, challenges, and practice. This learning is usually self-directed and allows employees to learn through on-the-job experiences.
- 20% of learning is social, which occurs through interacting with others, by completing tasks and overcoming challenges together.
- 10% of learning is formal, which can be achieved through face-to-face training or engaging online courses.
A healthy learning culture needs to be nurtured by everyone within your organization in order for it to be effective. Organizations that successfully implement the 70 20 10 model show improved processes and better efficiency overall [1].
Let's look at how you can achieve these results using 70 20 10.
Experiential Learning
As this type of learning happens by completing daily tasks and overcoming challenges, it’s important to support self-directed, experience-based learning. This enables employees to take ownership of improving their performance through on-the-job learning.
This learning by doing, helps your employees put new skills into practice in solo tasks, or through projects that require collaboration with others.
By learning through experience, employees may find a new or better way of completing a task without being consciously aware that they’re acquiring new skills. By building an open and collaborative culture, you’re creating a space where employees can share new ways of approaching tasks and projects, that will benefit your company as a whole.
Social Learning
As social learning is all about learning from others, this can't happen if your employees don't have to work, or interact with others, either within or outside of their own team.
To nurture this form of collaborative learning, you'll need to prioritize and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and resources with others, usually mentors or peers, within your workforce.
You can achieve this by:
- encouraging managers to make time to mentor and coach their direct reports,
- creating communication channels for teams using messaging software,
- using a forum within your LMS to encourage conversations around learning.
Each of these elements will help you to build a collaborative culture where your employees can record, store, and share their learnings with each other.
Formal Learning
Formal training is necessary to establish your employees' baseline knowledge so you know everyone is starting with the same level of information. However, just because it's formal, doesn't mean it has to be any less collaborative than social or experiential learning. Formal training can be delivered face-to-face or online, using a tool like a Learning Management System (LMS).
Regardless of how you decide to implement your formal learning, it can often be viewed by employees as a task they have to complete in addition to their day to day ones. It's important that you let them know that completing the training is just as important as any other task they have on their to-do list. This shows them you understand how important formal learning is, for providing them with the skills they need to confidently fulfill their role.
If you're delivering formal learning via an LMS, remember to measure its success. It's one of the most powerful tools you have. Through measuring engagement, completion rates, exam results, training histories, and more, you can discover the real impact this learning is having.
Monitoring training impact in this way will enable you to tweak and adapt your courses to ensure they're tailored to your employees' needs, and importantly, more effective for them.
Nurturing Collaborative Learning
Creating a learning culture isn't a one and done practice. It needs to be continuous, constantly worked on, so that learning becomes a natural habit in your organization.
And your organization's learning culture needs to be collaborative and open in order for you to reap the benefits of the 70 20 10 model. It's not just about having engaging course content; in fact, you could create award-winning courses, but without allowing others to share the knowledge they've gained with peers, its impact will be lessened.
Your employees will be less likely to learn and engage in tasks and jobs if they feel their experiences and opinions won't be heard. Having this collaborative culture can only benefit your company through the continuous production of new ideas and ways of getting work done. Download the eBook How To Leverage The 70 20 10 Model For High Performing Employees and get to discover all about the 70 20 10 model, an L&D theory that encapsulates all of the different ways that people learn. Join the available webinar, too, to find out more insightful information about the 70 20 10 model.
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