Collaborative learning strategies for your workouts

Learn how to empower your subject matter experts

Your business is brimming with talent – the talent you’ve carefully selected. While every employee of your company is there to do his or her job, your employees can do much more. Everyone in your company has unique experiences and knowledge that make them who they are. With the right collaborative learning strategies, you can spread that knowledge to your entire team.

But what is collaborative learning? Collaborative learning helps teams learn quickly, stay people-oriented and share ownership.

In other words, if you don’t use collaborative learning strategies, you are not getting the full potential of your team. Collaborative learning strategies can help you create a learning environment in which employees bring out the best in each other. To help you build a culture of collaboration and make sure you get the most out of your team — and your team gets the most out of each other, too — we’ve put together several strategies to get you started.

1. Peer training activities: employees help each other

peer training activities are when you link employees together to learn and share knowledge as a team. The power of peer training lies in its ability to get colleagues talking, build camaraderie and facilitate mutual knowledge sharing.

Peer training activities involve the sharing of knowledge between two or more people. To facilitate this, create an environment and perform activities that make people feel free and safe to learn and share.

• Organized peer training are one trajectory. Make time for your team to discuss something they’ve learned. These can be formal presentations on a topic, or more informal discussion sessions that are simply led by one person.
• Brainstorming sessions around a recurring challenge are another type of peer training activity. Present your team with a problem that keeps coming up and see what solutions they come up with as a group. These sessions foster collaboration and discussion, both of which inevitably lead to knowledge sharing.
• Have your employees present customer challenges or victories. These are great starting points for group discussions and can lead to knowledge sharing and prevent these challenges from happening again.

There is no fixed guidance on peer training activities. Feel free to include your own branding or put your own spin on this collaborative learning strategy. Most importantly, your team learns and grows together.

2. Coach culture: Peer-Guided Learning

make a coaching culture in which peers take on the responsibility of acting as coaches for their teammates. Coaches will help their peers with direct training and act as guides as they move deeper into their careers.

The main advantage of the coaching culture is that it takes some of the training burden off management and enables employees to carry the torch. Like peer training, this collaborative learning strategy can lead to both parties learning from each other.

Coaching can be a formal role, similar to a mentor or leader, or an activity involving selected employees.

If coaching is a formal role, it is likely to be an important activity for that employee. This type of role may lead to a management position or may continue as a subset of that individual contributor’s responsibilities. Coaches differ from management in that one of their primary goals is to help others grow, while managers often have several leadership tasks on their plate in addition to employee growth.

Coaching as an activity is not necessarily reserved for those seeking management positions, but can be a great way to give experienced employees the opportunity to share knowledge and help others be mentors. If you have seasoned employees willing to share their expertise and create a smoother onboarding process for new hires, coaching is a great way to make this happen.

Regardless of the formality, coaches must work with peers to help them fill knowledge gaps, identify goals, and build a path to achieve them. Check in with your coaches regularly to see how they think relationships are developing, as well as contact those being coached.

3. Peer Reviews: Employees Work and Learn

Peer reviews, or peer feedback loops, are about giving employees the opportunity to assess each other’s work. This collaborative learning strategy not only enables two-way learning, but also eliminates some of the work that another employee is typically responsible for. This type of learning is most applicable in creative environments, but can also be useful elsewhere.

Peer review can vary in practice, depending on your industry and the responsibilities of your employees. If your employees are responsible for creating something, such as articles or designs, have them collaborate and peer review each other’s work.

Peer reviewing is not a direct substitute for an editor, but it allows your employees to gain experience at the other end of the creative spectrum and give them the opportunity to exchange knowledge and learn from each other’s styles and methods.

4. Employee-led courses: peers become subject matter experts

Give your employees a platform and encourage those who are willing to educate on a topic through employee-led courses and training.

Employee courses are great for building trust in your team and giving them the opportunity to increase their expertise. Employee training also results in a more complete and better trained team overall, without the need for additional input from Learning and Development (L&D) or management. And as a bonus, giving a course helps the employee to learn that subject even better!

Start by equipping your employees with the right tools to create courses on topics they are knowledgeable about. With a platform that encourages peer learning, your team can create courses and quickly share knowledge. These courses can be work related, draw on employee experiences with customers and so on to make them unique.

You are also free to teach courses on just about anything. Knowledge is power, even if it is not directly related to your business! Offering employee-led courses that cover a wide variety of topics is still a great way to help your team build trust, spread knowledge, and practice course creation.

5. Crowdsourced Wikis: Leveraging Institutional Knowledge

Corporate wikis act as a centralized location for virtually all corporate knowledge: training, processes, resources, etc. Basically, if you have digital resources or valuable knowledge, it can be housed in your wiki. Crowdsource your company wiki and let your team share their collective knowledge in one accessible place.

Use a tool like tectra or Concept to create a corporate wiki or knowledge base that acts as your knowledge center. From there, you will link to all existing resources relevant to an employee’s success. You should also create pages within the wiki that cover corporate culture, processes, specific training, and anything else employees need to know.

Give your team the opportunity to suggest changes and new content to the company wiki to take full advantage of this collaborative learning strategy. Give one or more leadership or HR members the ability to approve changes and ensure that all information added is accurate and appropriate.

With these crowdsourced wikis you can: use institutional knowledge and provide a resource for both new and experienced employees, with no added input from L&D or HR.

Find the right tools for your collaborative learning strategies

Strong collaborative learning strategies will go a long way in creating a culture of learning and collaboration. But the right tools are also important. 360Learn provides the first collaborative learning platform, enabling your team to work together to create courses and training. With 360Learning and the above practices at your disposal, you can create a truly collaborative learning culture that empowers your entire team.

Sign up for your free 360Learning demo and see for yourself how our collaborative learning platform can help you democratize knowledge and strengthen your team.

Originally published on 360learning.com.