Advantages Of Collaborative Studying For Telecommuting Groups
Notable benefits of collaborative learning for your remote teams
So, collaborative learning has some incredible benefits in terms of employee engagement, retention, and learning performance. But what about the increasing migration to remote work? How can collaborative learning help teams adapt to the reality of teleworking or the new hybrid working model?
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How collaborative learning increases engagement rates to over 90%
From benefits to proven strategies, this guide has everything you need to start a successful collaborative learning program for your remote workers!
3 benefits of collaborative learning for teleworking teams
Here are 3 undeniable benefits of collaborative learning for teams working remotely or teleworking.
1. Collaborative learning helps companies remain flexible
With a learning platform that leverages collaborative learning, you can keep your employees informed of changes by creating courses in minutes instead of months. This allows your company to react quickly to accelerating technologies, industry upheavals and unpredictable world events. It also ensures that all employees have the same access to information regardless of how often they are physically in the office.
In recent years, global events have shown us that a company’s priorities, goals and infrastructure can change overnight. For example, in March and April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced workers to suddenly switch to remote work. Employees had to learn new work processes and introduce new technologies without planning or preparation time.
In an ideal world, L&D would have made this transition, but most learning platforms don’t allow for quick course production. Traditional learning methods mean that creating a single training course can take months of group work, and L&D teams often rely on curriculum planners to create courses. The whole process is admin and resource intensive. It’s also super expensive thanks to dinosaur technology like SCORM.
The solution?
Collaborative learning makes it easier and cheaper to create and share learning materials. Anyone in the company can quickly learn how to create a course without the need for outside help. This is one of the greatest advantages of collaborative learning.
Sales Enablement can demonstrate new product features. Customer Satisfaction can create a tutorial to help sales reps solve a specific recurring problem. John in Accounting can demonstrate the new expense report filing process. All of these courses are easy to distribute, and teachers (course authors) can get quick feedback from relevant stakeholders as it iterates and improves over time.
This accessibility opens the door to completely new possibilities for employee training. You can still create comprehensive onboarding courses and set learning pathways. But you can also develop micro-courses that are only relevant for a single department or even for a single position. When we all work remotely, this flexibility is essential to respond to changes in the world. It also helps keep teams connected, engaged, and stimulated – even when we’re all stuck at home. In this way, you can reduce employee turnover and retain top performers.
An example of this nimble learning culture in practice
Let’s say your company introduces new accounting software. With collaborative learning, the Customer Ops team can quickly create best practices and a course on how to use the software. Employees can use the software immediately. Customer departments can then continue to update the course to include employee questions as it submits, so everyone stays up to date.
If your LMS for collaborative learning is in the cloud rather than on-premise, all of this work can be done remotely with employees around the world. No matter how many people make it into the office or not, your L&D programs can always be delivered on time.
2. Collaborative learning puts people at the center of learning
Employees are a company’s most valuable resource – but it is difficult to keep employees happy and engaged in a remote environment. Collaborative learning tools can help you increase engagement remotely by allowing teams to connect and share their knowledge and experiences. This has enormous advantages for team building and internal knowledge exchange.
Too many companies view learning as a one-way street: L&D creates learning materials and employees consume them. Everything goes in one direction, with no possibility for back and forth or feedback. When many of us are still working remotely, this learning model only adds to the potential problems of isolation, distancing, and distancing.
This approach also ignores the way people learn today. Media consumption habits have changed to favor peer-driven content. You just have to look at the growth of multi-billion dollar social media companies to see that people are the most responsive to peer-driven content. Especially when we work and study remotely, this peer-driven content can instill the sense of community that people crave.
The solution?
This is one of the greatest benefits of collaborative learning and it has a huge impact on your learning culture. A collegial bottom-up method of creating learning materials leads to better results than traditional eLearning methods. Employees can identify specific learning needs based on knowledge gaps, and in-house experts address those needs by remotely creating relevant courses.
This approach helps create space for conversation, feedback, and iteration. You can create more effective study materials, increase employee engagement, and encourage your teams to stick together and help each other – even if they work in different countries and time zones. While working remotely offers many benefits, there is a risk that employees will feel isolated, out of date, or lose interest if companies fail to actively encourage human-to-human interaction in one form or another. This is why the peer-to-peer element of collaborative is so critical in a remote work environment.
3. Collaborative learning enables a distributed corporate culture
With the global switch to remote work, the corporate culture no longer exists in one place. Now, businesses everywhere need a way to build and nurture their distinctive cultures in a dispersed manner where everyone has their role – even from home.
This is a major challenge for many companies. Many companies have failed because of this in the past, especially in times of crisis. A rigid top-down corporate culture only exacerbates the problem as it is inevitably less flexible and tailored to the needs of employees when it comes to teleworking. Centralized learning programs only add to the problem as they tend to focus on specific outcomes, e.g. B. the further qualification of large groups of employees regardless of individual growth opportunities. To achieve this, they turn to universal solutions such as mass retraining or personal training seminars.
These solutions usually make employees feel like a number rather than valued team members. This lack of personalization is a major contributor to the current engagement crisis and is made worse by the fact that we all still interact with one another through our screens.
The solution?
Fortunately, collaborative learning offers a solution that helps keep employees happy, present, and focused. It encourages every employee to adopt the corporate culture at a distance by creating an environment in which they can bring their skills and experience to the fore by creating content for a common goal. In a collaborative learning environment, each individual’s skills and ideas are truly valued.
A culture of decentralized learning empowers all people and helps them move forward on their learning path. Most importantly, decentralized learning is useful in a company of 10 or 10,000 people. It works regardless of whether you are all in the same building or scattered around the world. It scales as the business grows and is flexible enough to adapt to the company’s priorities. This makes it a crucial tool to keep remote teams engaged and motivated and to strengthen employee loyalty even in times of crisis and uncertainty.
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Are you looking for inside secrets to change attitudes towards online training and actively involve employees in the process? Download the eBook on How Collaborative Learning Raises Engagement Rates to Over 90% to learn how the collaborative approach breaks down barriers and maximizes your company’s L&D potential.
References:
360Learning
360Learning is the learning platform that combines collaborative tools with the power of an LMS. We empower L&D teams to drive culture and growth through collaborative learning.
