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Collaboration and Learning in the Flow of Work

Published Wed Jun 03 2020

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If the recent changes to our work environments have taught us anything, it's that when being faced with a challenge, we can rise to it. Thinking about learning in particular, before COVID-19, we often saw hour-long courses to help us learn how to work remotely, keep engaged, or use a certain software or tool. Now we have to know how to do these things, and organizations adjusted and started to curate more content on the above topics instead of building new courses from scratch. Companies started to look at what communication tools they already had available and pushed out content accordingly. Through all of this, it’s extremely important though not just to start pushing out content and using tools to easily connect remotely but to also think about the strategy behind all of this, and, hopefully, keep up this new way of working once we’ve fought off this pandemic.

Learning in the Flow of Work

One strategy to consider in this new age is learning in the flow of work. Workflow learning differs from traditional L&D approaches. We often overwhelm employees with heavy content pieces focused on knowledge transfer either in e-learning modules or hour-long workshops. Learning in the flow of work, however, puts the employee in touch with the right resources at the right time and right place. Workflow learning is designed to drive business outcomes and performance and focus on the learner. There are myriad ways to achieve learning in the flow of work. From using tools already available in an organization, such as Microsoft tools and apps (think Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and SharePoint), to integrating outside resources (such as LinkedIn or Twitter) to help create community.

Collaboration As One Key to Workflow Learning Success

Another way to create community and allow employees to learn in the flow of work is collaboration. This refers to collaboration within a team, a project team, or an organization but can also mean collaboration outside of an organization. We see lots of collaboration happening right now. Within organizations, teams have virtual coffee breaks to connect and brainstorm ideas. Outside organizations, individuals cast a bigger net within their industries to come up with innovative ideas to help fight COVID-19.

Interestingly enough, when asking different people about collaboration, we see different definitions:

  • Collaboration happens when two or more people work constructively to create a result that extends beyond the limited vision of each individual. (Steven Bleau, instructional system designer)

  • Collaboration is the powerhouse of behavior change. Any collaboration in learning should give you the chance to gather new ideas, thoughts, or concepts, test your ideas on others, and build something that is better than you could build on your own. (Vanitha Krishnamurthy, senior learning experience designer)

  • A group of two or more people working together by contributing variety inputs including ideas, discussions, and files to achieve something greater than if they’d done it individually. (Renee Brisson-Khan, instructional and learning experience designer)

  • Collaboration goes beyond working together in silos to achieve an end result. It requires a team that is open to input and ideas of others for every element of the product to ensure it is not representative of just one individual but of the team. (Katherine Hill, instructional and learning experience designer)

What Does Collaboration Mean to You?

What’s common in each of these definitions is that there seems to be a bigger purpose that collaborators work toward to achieve lasting change. This is powerful, and we would be amiss if we didn’t integrate collaborative aspects into everything we design. As people collaborate, they organically learn from one another through mindfulness, watching and listening to others, and reflection.

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