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Here are a few things you can do in your organization to make sure that employees have easier paths toward informal learning:
Understand how people in your organization communicate with each other. Who goes to lunch with whom? Who sits next to whom? How are daily how-to questions being asked and answered?
Look for opportunities to make communication easier. Keep in mind that your employees may be finding each other outside of your brick-and-mortar building, or even outside of your intranet and firewall. What social media outlets are they using? Find ways to support and encourage free-flow information.
Build time into your formal training to allow informal learning to take place. In the case of the engineers, they were often working so hard on their projects that lunch was seen as a waste of time. Reprioritizing work assignments gave new employees time to breathe — and time to seek out a colleague or mentor.
Implement Experience Application Program Interface protocols (xAPI) in your learning technology. xAPI is specifically designed to track a wide variety of informal learning experiences, such as books, YouTube videos, discussions or hands-on practice. The data you collect will also give you some great insights into more desire paths to support.
Stand back and let it happen. Perhaps the hardest thing for a learning professional to do is refrain from over-designing learning. Over the years, we’ve all been conditioned to believe that we’re the ones who make learning happen, when actually we are sometimes the ones who are most in the way. It turns out that people learn because they want to learn – not because we tell them to do so.
Informal learning will happen in the workplace. The only question is whether you are helping it along or standing in the way.
Via Sharrock
