How Social Learning and Feedback Ensures Successful Employee Training

The Collaborative Model Works

Nowadays, a growing number of companies encounter the serious challenge of designing the best training program that will lead to employee engagement and improve the bottom line. Businesses also search for fresh and innovative ways to motivate their employees to learn and master crucial skills. Thus, companies are beginning to take a good look at how they run their business and deal with customers. The application of new technologies also serve as a practical way to enhance and ensure quality results in their employee training process.

Experience and Training: Key Ingredients of Success

According to research, a combination of training and experience is important to ensure success. Hence, it may be useful for your organization to apply the 70:20:10 learning model, where each component refers to the three essential forms that make up organizational learning. These components include informal learning by practice and experience (70 percent), social experiences (20 percent), and formal learning (10 percent). By analyzing this model further, you will know that social approach to learning and training is essential in ensuring excellent results.

What Makes Social Learning an Effective Approach 

In the past few years, social learning has been a popular approach to training employees in the workplace. As informal learning has become widely accepted in various industries, it has resulted to remarkable improvements in employees’ competencies. In addition, the popularity of this technique has encouraged collaboration and internal conversation among learners and instructors.

Another trend in the field of e-learning is gamification. Employees are applying training games to increase collaboration, increase proficiency and motivation to help them adopt the finest practices and skills essential in their job. As a result, employees gain a better understanding of their customers, which promote greater efficiency and an improved quality of service.

Wheeldo has made a break in the field of social learning through gamification and has adopted the organizational model involving the 70:20:10 components. This model also uses formal and informal methods with social training games. However, gamification and social training lose their meaning when these approaches fail to provide transparency to the behavior of users. At present, platforms continue to make a greater effort to promote efficient analyses and production of reports to help managers and employees track their progress and assess their behavior. This way, they can expect a greater improvement on their performance on a long-term basis.

Tracking Progress with Gamification 

Organizations use gamification to build stronger and more competent teams, train supervisors and develop employees by providing learners with an engaging means of learning business processes and essential critical skills. It applies to any individuals’ natural instinct for achievement, status, competition, self-expression and closure. When development, learning and training are implemented as a game, one’s natural competitive tendencies are triggered, which can lead to motivation and engagement.

Ever since the concept of gamification was introduced to various industries in 2010, more than 350 companies have started their own gamification projects. Renowned brands such as NBC, Ford, eBay, MLB, and Adobe, are only some of these top companies that implemented this novel technique in their business processes. In 2012 to 2013, major consulting agencies such as Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte have applied gamification practices used by Fortune 500 companies.

Badges, leader boards, and similar game components function as persuasive rewards for users, and these can also be used in tracking their progress. Gabe Zichermann, Chairman of GSummit, states that gamification helps increase customer loyalty and engagement, which is measured by repeated visits by as much as 30 percent. This technique fosters teamwork by focusing more on notable behavior reinforced by team participation and healthy competition.

Bottom Line

To sum up, gamification and social learning are necessities in every industry. It sparks interest and engagement in everyone in the organization while improving business processes and customer service. Thus, it only makes sense to implement this approach for maximum business productivity on a long-term basis.

Danielle Arad is the director of marketing at Wheeldo.com and chief writer and editor of Wheeldo Social Learning Blog. You may connect with her via Twitter, LinkedIn or email at danielle@wheeldo.com.

Flickr Image by CGIAR Climate