‘The team is a company’s best asset.’ It’s a phrase that’s been uttered in boardrooms, office spaces, and business literature for generations.  It certainly holds true. After all, without an engaged, committed team, a company’s impact and growth trajectory is limited. A team that is built of motivated individuals inspires action, ensures proactivity, and secures future success. Empower that team to benefit from all the shared knowledge around them and you’re hitting the jackpot.

Spurred by the pandemic, we’ve revisited core assumptions about how and where we work. Now, 30% of people across the EU work remotely or in a hybrid model, up from 5.5% in 2019. It was a push to reassess how we do things and to better provide for our teams and workers. It showed that environments of trust and empowerment lead to better engagement and results by creating a greater sense of belonging and inclusion.

In our hybrid and remote world, this is more important than ever. Now, it’s time to challenge traditional top-down approaches to learning and development where executives set training priorities and force teams to comply. It’s time to create a culture of knowledge-sharing and upskilling with the power of collaborative learning.

Create a culture of knowledge-sharing and empowerment

Collaborative learning dismantles traditional educational hierarchies, encouraging each learner to contribute to collective organizational knowledge whilst also benefiting from the insights of individual peers and the group learning process as a whole.

Collaborative learning leverages the unique experiences of everyone within an organization and the benefits of this approach are enormous. At a glance, the core benefits can be uncovered in the DESIRE framework:

Democratization: Collaborative learning democratizes education by empowering everyone to both bring something to the table and take something from it. It makes employees feel more valued, engaged, and focused and considers each individual.

Speed: Collaborative learning enables a company to move fast and stay nimble. People come together, declare their learning needs, and convene teams to quickly solve problems. It’s agile by nature.

Impact: At its core, collaborative learning is about creating and sharing knowledge and know-how within an organization. It actively looks for feedback and engages participants to be proactive and fully involved.

Iteration: Long-term success requires scrutiny, feedback, and adaptability. Collaborative learning tools are designed specifically to make it easy to update courses to reflect new information or flag old material – it stays fresh and relevant.

Relevance: With collaborative learning, employees are directly involved with identifying and fulfilling their learning needs, which means that learning is always relevant and always personalized. It removes the guesswork for learning and development teams and puts the power of learning directly into the hands of the employees.

The collaborative learning blueprint

The benefits of collaborative learning are clear for businesses. But, they can only benefit individual learners when properly implemented, with a top-down approach, that enables learners to be self-driven and have the space to learn and contribute.

There are five conditions that need to be in place to make the magic happen: a team that is willing to collaborate; the ability to give feedback, motivation, and constructive criticism; personal responsibility and active participation; open communication; and finally, regular assessment.

While these five conditions are fundamental to making collaborative learning work, it doesn’t mean existing learning and development processes need to be completely overhauled overnight.

Rather than panicking about re-writing processes, learning leaders should instead focus on the most important outcomes, working backward to achieve desired results. This ensures they are focusing on real problems in the learning culture. Over time, this will result in a wholesale change in the way employees learn.

Further, learning and development teams needn’t fear the end of their role with the embrace of collaborative learning. Rather, they play a crucial part in unlocking and facilitating the process. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, as the saying goes.

How can learning and development teams build a culture of collaborative learning?

The collaborative learning blueprint is a way that learning and development leaders can build a learning culture that is participative, transformative, and sustainable, in much the same way that many team leaders have embraced hybrid and remote work. This takes four key steps.

Step 1: Embrace decentralized learning
Decentralization in business is all about creating networks, connecting teams, and sharing the workload. It throws the hierarchy in the bin and opens up whole-team collaboration and active participation. This bottom-up approach overturns the conventional approach to organizational learning and empowers employees to direct their learning processes.

Step 2: Emphasise self-directed learning
It might seem counterintuitive, but self-directed learning is not a solo activity. Rather, it happens when learning and development teams meet employees where they are and help them do whatever it is they’re trying to do. It’s facilitative.

Learning and development teams can increase engagement and self-directed learning by using tools that identify learning and development needs through performance feedback and then provide the relevant resources.

Step 3: Promote knowledge-sharing
Next up, embrace the whole team. Leverage the expertise that already exists. The simple fact of the matter is that people learn from people. An organization’s employees have the skills and subject-matter expertise to help it succeed and it is critical that organizations encourage their experts to share their knowledge with their peers.

Sharing knowledge across an organization is about more than raw productivity, it also fosters transparency, visibility, trust, and feelings of ownership and belonging.

A team might not even realize the abundance of skills and knowledge possessed by its members unless they are encouraged to share it.

Step 4: Choose the right learning tools
There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. It’s important that each organization chooses the learning tools that will best support their team. When looking for the right platform, it’s key to consider if the tool will make it faster, easier, and cheaper for employees to meet their learning needs.

As mentioned earlier, a major strength of collaborative learning is its adaptability, so it’s important that the learning software can be easily updated based on feedback from learners.

Towards a new era of learning
Collaborative learning leverages the unique experiences of everyone within an organization. Ultimately, it is about creating and sharing knowledge and know-how within an organization and it brings a huge amount of benefits.

For instance, AlphaSights, a platform that connects companies with industry experts to drive better outcomes, employs collaborative learning to improve training performance. As a result, the company has improved course completion (95% on average), with 98% of those trained reporting that it more effectively prepared them for the demands of their job.

Our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic helped to explode some long-held reservations about hybrid and remote working. Now, it’s up to us to take another step. We need to embrace collaborative learning with open arms and leverage our internal expertise to help people everywhere upskill from within and stay ready for whatever tomorrow has in store.

Excerpt taken from Collaborative Learning – How to Upskill from Within and Turn L&D into your Competitive Advantage by Nick Hernandez (published by Kogan Page).