Social learning may not have the similar attention that other learning and development components get, but there are pretty compelling reasons to create a part of the overall plan.
What is social learning? How does it function, and why do you need to be concerned with integrating it into L&D strategy?
Social learning: A brief
To know the potential of social learning, you need to establish it from the start. But, what exactly is social learning? It is something that humans tend to be involved in, and we all do it since the time we are born.
Learning with and from the people around us is social learning. As a baby, we learn from our caretakers and guardians. As we move towards adulthood, the sphere expands to our friends, teachers, and peers. We are designed to function in a social environment. After all, we humans are social animals.
Social learning takes place from the time we interact with other people, directly or indirectly. When you take help from someone to understand a new program or access software, that is social learning. When you teach someone how to use a computer application, that’s social learning.
Social learning can happen face-to-face, interacting on social media, discussion forums, email, over chat, or messaging platforms.
Why do you need social learning in your company?
Why do you need to implement social learning in your company’s L&D strategy? There are ample reasons, along with the fact that it’s simple to integrate with a modern LMS.
The Litmos learning management system can implement social learning in a wide range of methods not tied to LMS directly. It delivers improved learner outcomes, from learning socially without realizing it to implementing cost-efficient and learning effective social learning.
Social learning breaks down in-house silos, and employees make new connections outside of their teams. It offers a quicker transfer of knowledge than other methods of learning. It is essential for creating a thriving culture and innovation.
How to implement social learning?
While it is simple to look at the advantage of social learning, it may not seem easy to understand how to apply it within your company. This is held explicitly if your learning and development efforts are out of the box.
It entirely depends on pre-made modules and is designed with little or absolutely zero content on your own. It might fall into social learning.
Encourage interaction and implement a social environment.
To start with, you need to encourage interaction within employees. You can do this with the help of a learning management system if it easily integrates social engagement. You can get apps like Zoom and Skype or video chats for interaction within teams and departments.
Chat apps like Slack, Trello, Facebook Messenger also help with social engagement. You can create discussion forum threads to initiate a healthy interaction of employees among the team.
To encourage interaction, create forums, you need to create a competition. When employees compete within an organization, it improves the learning environment, but it betters the engagement among the employees.
When employees enjoy themselves, they learn better. Their knowledge and information retention rise, their completion rate increases, more and more learners will sign up voluntarily into courses.
Conclusion:
Consider creating a question-answer feature into your learning management system.
Ultimately, every business needs to consider integrating social learning into its Learning and Development strategy. This makes sure that employees are engaged in training and learning programs, but it speeds up the learning process, as well. This builds a relationship among the employees and boosts knowledge retention.
