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Social Learning

2 minutes read
HR Best Practices
Through our daily work with over 1300 organisations, we see many examples of innovative thinking in HR. In this series of 14 best practices we define true "best practices" in HR nowadays. To kick off we will further explain the topic of Social Learning with a case study of a Top Employer in the Energy Industry.


Social Learning allows employees to learn from colleagues and peers. Top Employers that promote such initiatives are dedicated to allocating resources and materials for training to ensure these initiatives are scalable.

Social learning in the Energy Industry 

This Top Employer (Europe and North Africa, 7800 employees) needs to frequently train its manufacturing, customer care and after-sales teams because of the fast-changing technology it works with. In addition to this, the company’s resellers also need training to be able to properly serve their end-customers efficiently. With this in mind, this company has implemented a social learning tool in the form of an educational website where all internal and external technicians can collaborate and post information. The focus of this channel is to encourage interested parties to share video tutorials of product installations where the technicians have utilised innovative methods or have come up with out-of-the-box solutions. 

The aforementioned tool creates a dialogue between in-house and external team members and allows all of them to upload their own training materials and contribute to the development of others in the field. To support the initiative, all technicians were trained on how to film themselves and create these tutorial videos. In addition, they were provided with resources like GoPros, masks, lamps and other props to ensure high-quality recordings. The web manager of the company is also a technician and is responsible for codifying and ranking the videos to allow them to be easily searchable. 

The company can measure the impact of this practice via tracking its customer satisfaction levels, which have been positive. These results relate to the time saved in cases where previous solutions could be re-used. The time gained is particularly valuable during the maintenance phase. The noticeable limitation of this practice is the amount of content available and the quality of these tutorials.  To ensure scale (and to keep the technicians engaged), an incentive programme could be developed in the future.

Our Conclusion

Social learning is a key aspect of creating a collaborative working culture. Employee engagement and involvement can be enhanced by including employees in designing the content for training. Such initiatives not only recognise efforts of the employees, but will encourage a culture of sharing knowledge and expertise that can only be beneficial for any organisation.

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