Right here, we focus on social and informal learning. Activities that colleagues - with a little help - can do and develop themselves. Let's forget about certificates and diplomas for a moment.
What is a learning culture?
A learning culture is an organization's ability to learn from its experiences and take them beyond time and boundaries. In fact, the answer to this question could turn into several long articles on just that, but that will have to wait for another time. For now, let's use the above classic definition of organizational learning capability (Ashkenas, 1995) as the overarching concept, the lid of our puzzle:
Inspired by hospital learning culture
The inspiration for this article is based on insights into the learning environment at Viborg Regional Hospital, where doctors are constantly seeking knowledge, sharing best practices, developing treatment methods and using the collective knowledge to organize treatment paths. Is your organization as ambitious as Viborg Regional Hospital? You can decide for yourself afterwards.
Your organization is probably not a hospital(?) and therefore some terms will be different for you. Try running the translation in your head: "What would this look like for us?"
Why do you want to strengthen your learning culture?
Your learning culture can help solve a variety of organizational, professional and human challenges. Here's a sampling:
- To attract new, talented colleagues?
- To develop the best solutions for the organization?
- To motivate your current employees?
- To be able to handle new demands and requests from the outside world?
- To drive better results?
- To increase employee engagement with the organization?
- To be able to implement change more easily?
- In order to induce the desired behavior?
Let's start our inspiration tour with the first of the 8 activities. It's all about taking turns as a teacher.
1) Internal shared learning
Like any cookie scheme, the teaching duties rotate between all members of the team or department. Of course, the topic must be relevant and delivered in a way that fits the timeframe.
The fact that we focus our attention and include everyone in contributing to the shared learning sends a clear signal that learning is important and that we are important to each other's learning. We also train important skills such as communication and oral presentation at the same time.
In the hospital, this takes the form of a 15-minute training session during the morning conference, where the outgoing shift hands over the ward's patients to the incoming shift. Here, all the doctors involved in the last 24 hours of operations are together for 15 minutes, every day. This method can move mountains in many arenas of life.
2) Professional and social role communities
Having common interests, shared observations, common goals and common challenges are excellent starting points for relating to each other. The interests of a newly hired 25-year-old employee are not the same as those of the 55-year-old experienced specialist who has been working in his specialty since before the Great Belt Bridge opened.
They can still benefit from each other, but we'll get to that later.
Creating professional and social communities/networks among like-minded people can be a great way to both connect and provide opportunities for relevant experience sharing.
For these networks, you need to consider the level of governance around the meetings:
- Should meetings be facilitated?
- Should topics be pre-determined?
- Should there be complete freedom of movement in the dough?
- A combination of freedom and facilitation from time to time?
It depends on the desired outcome and the role the network will play for the individual participant and the group as a whole.
Consider choosing different levels of governance depending on which network you're talking about. Perhaps there should be less control over the network for the "young managers" than for the group of "experienced lawyers", as the social aspect should be given priority? Maybe it should be the other way around?
CP_200D↩PS. Be careful not to destroy the dynamics, cohesion and push the psychological comfort level by bringing too many guests, facilitators, senior leaders into the room.
3) Mentoring
Apprenticeships are a dwindling but beautiful dynamic of past societies. An experienced master who, through long-term supervision and guidance, passes on their skills to the next generation. Beautiful. It's not seen as much anymore, as it's expensive to prioritize a 1-to-1 relationship in this way. A good compromise can be mentoring.
People of different experience are matched - as mentor and mentee - and expectations are set for this relationship, as well as a framework for how it should unfold.
- A professional mentor - Provides you with answers and professional development, but quite often also has an elevated status and therefore power that makes certain topics in your conversations impossible. Therefore, it may be wise to combine with a social mentor where the status difference is smaller.
- A social mentor - Someone who has a little more seniority than you in the organization, who you can ask professional questions, but also all the other "pesky questions" - Do you pay for your own lunch here? Where can I renew my access card?
The strength of these relationships is that it builds mutual respect, understanding and a long-term relationship that can provide insight into development over time.
When organizations appoint mentors from among more experienced employees, it also sends a clear signal that learning is a priority for the organization and that everyone should get involved.
4) Inverse feedback
Feedback is a top-down process. This is the perception in many relationships and organizations. But it doesn't have to be that way. If you want to grow as an organization, including your most experienced members, you need to take active steps to turn feedback on its head. Hence the name; Inverse feedback.
In some places it is also called; Upwards feedback.
In its simplest form, it involves setting up sessions where younger employees give feedback to their older colleagues and managers. The experienced colleagues put themselves in a listening position and receive feedback from their younger team members or referring employees.
It's often beneficial to delineate what topics the feedback should cover and provide direction on how to deliver the feedback. Give the responsibility for collecting, conducting and summarizing these inverse feedback sessions to a facilitator in the younger group.
This method can be useful for managers to initiate. Their inverse feedback can be about their leadership, governance, communication, stakeholder management, from the employees' point of view. In this article, you can read more about what it actually takes for a manager to get honest, critical feedback from their employees.
In the hospital, it looks like this:
- Inverse feedback is held 3 times a year
- Feedback is given from junior doctors to more experienced doctors
- Feedback is given on "supervision skills, feedback and peer support" - NOT professionalism
- Feedback is collected from junior doctors and delivered by a junior doctor spokesperson
- The senior doctor participates listening and explains how they understand the feedback
- Summary of retention and development points are sent to the senior doctor and stored in a visible place on the shared drive
5) Appoint a learning culture leader
If you want things to happen, it's good to have someone in charge. As we all know, being in charge doesn't mean that you have to do all the tasks related to the organization's learning. But it does mean that you initiate, support, monitor and adjust initiatives and their impact on learning.
The role needs to be clarified and the mandate needs to be refined. You can use the questions below as a starting point:
- What does the role entail?
- How many resources should be put into the role (time, funds, etc.)?
- What success criteria are therefore worked on?
- Who should be involved in decisions?
- Which action areas should be prioritized first?
- How, what and to whom to report?
At the hospital, the person is called the chief education officer - who is it at your hospital?
6) Internal workshops and case work
Everyone sees something, but no one sees everything. That's life in work communities, but there can be gold to be found in a colleague's experience. That's why we need to systematize the sharing. A very relevant way to do this is by organizing case work, professional discussions and internal workshops. All are based on social problem-based learning, where encountering problems and trying to find a solution drives the learning process.
These sessions typically require preparation and a few hours of dedicated time for a group of people. The cases worked on should have many possible solutions and bring out the participants' creative problem-solving ideas, which become central to the joint debate and discussion.
Working with cases makes the professional discussion less dangerous by externalizing the discussion to fictional or past cases, customers, patients.
Let an expert facilitate the case work and guide the participants' discussions. An expert will also be able to select, collect and bring materials and cases more easily.
At the hospital, an experienced specialist physician conducts case work in well-known and complex medical conditions such as headaches, shortness of breath, chest pain, sensory disturbances. To participate, relevant doctors with more professional interest and different levels of seniority are invited to work on these cases for a few hours.
7) Individual reflection time
Not all learning activities need to be social. In many cases, an hour of quiet time can be incredibly beneficial. Some of our customers tell us that the opportunity to reflect and the peace and quiet to plan your own development is something that is in short supply in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
If we look at one of Kolb's classic learning theories, we see that reflection plays a central role in our learning.
Therefore, delineated and prioritized time for individual development can be a great complement to social learning activities. Below is a list of ideas on how to use this time.
- Reflecting on your own learning or development plan
- Take an online course on a relevant topic
- Increase product knowledge of the company's products
- Prepare for the next 1:1 conversation
- Planning parties or social activities
- Read up on procedures in your work
- Read news and management reports
- Work on a side project in your area of interest
These sessions can be summarized together or in pairs.
8) 360-degree feedback
We humans are crafty social creatures, and if we're not kept on a short leash, we tend to do the things that feel good. A bit simplistic, but you get the idea.
This is also true in our feedback behavior. Paul Green, Professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, found that we shape our behavior to seek more appreciative rather than critical feedback when we can choose who we want to include in our learning. In a work community, we are simply more likely to ask the nice, supportive colleagues than those who bring critical perspectives. Read about his research here
However, this can be helped by introducing 360-degree feedback, where people in the organization collect feedback from different stakeholders in their work, such as managers, peers and employees, to get feedback from multiple angles. Some also include feedback from customers, suppliers or other relevant parties. The process can be a bit demanding, but typically yields great benefits for your learning culture.
There are a multitude of ways to do this. The collection can be supported by software systems, sometimes the feedback is handed over by a "facilitator" who has collected the feedback, other times it is up to the employee to collect the feedback and present it to a mentor for example.
PS. There are both good and bad ways to use 360-degree feedback in organizations, so be careful and think through your method for possible side effects.
We've written an article on how to get good at feedback, it might be relevant to take a look at.
Start small and choose relevant activities to build your learning culture
Organizational buy-in is necessary to prioritize learning culture and to achieve success and impact from these activities. This includes the need to select the most effective activities that best fit the organization's rhythms, desires and goals for learning.
As mentioned, few organizations are as dependent on their learning culture as hospitals. And that's why they are excellent role models in this area.
If you need advice on relevant initiatives and well-chosen implementation, Feedwork is always ready to contribute to your process.
About Feedwork and learning culture
Since 2016, we have helped over 150 organizations develop their learning cultures through the use of feedback, questions and inclusive dialogues.
We know that organizations need to deliver results to maintain their raison d'être, but we believe that people who thrive and learn in their work create the greatest value for the organization, for society and for themselves.
Call us or book a consultation here, that's how we like to start the dialog.
Thank you for reading!
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