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"Collaborative learning: what are we talking about?
This notion of collaborative, or peer-to-peer, learning is the focus of much attention from decision-makers. The learning organization is now a status claimed by many structures, with emblematic precursors such as Google as a benchmark.
Since 2018, more than 1/3 of French employees have observed a change in their company, and 58% consider collaboration to be improving. And for good reason, this revolution in corporate knowledge transfer carries strong values but, above all, convincing results.
What concrete benefits can be expected? How can these practices be reinforced within the company to make the most of them? Discover the opportunities offered by peer-to-peer learning to boost performance.
Peer learning as a vector for commitment
Co-training within the company enables each person with specific skills to share them, and bring new knowledge to their colleagues. It's an opportunity for everyone to capitalize on the uniqueness of each person's profile and career path.
The company's internal context also favors a wide variety of knowledge transmission formats: use cases, feedback, retrospectives and other post-mortems linked to team projects are all ways of capitalizing on knowledge sharing. This will directly encourage the adoption of a common language and common reflexes throughout the company.
These times of group discussion, led successively by a variety of employees, represent a powerful learning method, immediately vectoring team cohesion. Indeed, today more than ever, collaboration and the way in which it is articulated impact employees in several ways:
60% of them say that collaboration affects their motivation in their missions
59% creativity and 53% good project management
Regular meetings, transmission and mutual support between people engage the team together and bring a real synergy to collaboration. As employees' ability to cooperate expands, the company's overall performance tends more towards excellence.
Peer to peer learning and skills enhancement
In addition to fostering collaboration and raising community awareness of best practices that should be generalized throughout the company, collaborative learning also, and above all, broadens the scope of each individual's skills.
Each employee can be awakened to, and eventually master, knowledge not directly related to his or her position in the team. This knowledge is part of their culture, giving them a valuable overview in many contexts.
In this way, through peer-to-peer training, the company builds a collective intelligence that consists of global knowledge shared and actionable by all. This learning culture, which is growing rapidly within companies, is beneficial at every level. Access to knowledge is quick and easy, and occurs as soon as a need arises: we can then react quickly to provide employees with the skills they need to progress.
Knowledge transfer: finding your way around the tools
Knowledge transfer is nothing new. But today, in the context of the learning organization, this transfer of information must be cultivated and, above all, organized to ensure the continuity of the approach.
Numerous tools exist to promote continuous contact: in-house instant messaging (Slack), videoconferencing systems (Zoom, Teams...), collaborative work tools (GSuite, Figma, Klaxoon, Miro)... The ecosystem on offer is rich, but few solutions are specifically focused on ritualizing knowledge sharing.
Among the recurring pitfalls of the tools on the market :
- Too many tools piling up and losing the user.
- Overly comprehensive tools that end up slowing down adoption due to their complexity.
- Rather "cold" solutions in which people don't connect.
Not finding our ideal solution on the market, we decided to create it. We set out to build a tool that would encourage meetings between peers. In line with current usage, the application's ergonomic design makes it easy to set up and plan meetings between employees, in a secure space specific to the structure, whether the session is organized face-to-face or remotely. One-to-one, flash talk, feedback, all formats and durations can be adjusted and shaped to meet the specific needs of organizations.
The solution provides much more than just a planning function, as it allows you to suggest topics to share, or even, if the skill you're looking for isn't on offer, to express a training need: on seeing this request, another, more qualified member of the team can take up the subject and share his or her knowledge.
The content and replays thus created can then be shared and stored personally. This is particularly useful when onboarding new recruits, or providing support in upgrading skills. As everyone is both an actor and a consumer of the content, commitment and support for the tool are high.
Reinforcing these practices within the company: the necessary involvement of decision-makers.
Providing teams with a collaborative knowledge-sharing tool can encourage them to pool their knowledge even more: it creates a framework that makes it clear that this culture of learning, this desire to enrich the company's collective intelligence, comes "from the top". This will make employees all the more inclined to play the game, to take part in the collective effort and to train themselves; especially among the youngest.
Over a third of 22-37 year-olds say they would spend more time training if it were positively recognized by their manager(s). For employees under 22, the proportion rises to 44%, reflecting a strong need for managerial approval.
On the other hand, a lack of organizational flexibility or a corporate culture that leaves little room for these practices are real obstacles.
In 33% of cases, teams blame managers for the lack of collaboration, and in 32% of cases it's the overly hierarchical and vertical organization that hinders teamwork.
The methodology that characterizes the learning organization must therefore be pushed by decision-makers: it is in their interest to implement resources and tools that encourage collaborative learning within the company.
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