Man is a social animal. He doesn’t like to be isolated and alone for long periods. He wants to observe what’s happening around him, interact with people and listen to what people say. Keeping this natural tendency of human beings in mind, psychologists came up with social learning theory. This theory states that learning is a cognitive process that happens only through listening, talking, and observing.
If you closely observe, we have been doing social learning all our lives. We imitate our favorite characters and try to be like them by looking at their demeanor and personality. Observing someone can have that much influence on a person. This social learning is designed with the purpose that no one should feel lonely while they are learning and everyone should be involved in learning through each other and develop a collaborative learning ecosystem.
Many organizations understood the importance of social learning and started incorporating the same in their employee training program. This social learning can be achieved by leveraging learning management systems that support interactive features and peer-to-peer learning. For instance, LMS like 360Learning has many interactive features like Gamification that promote peer learning in a very fun and engaging manner. 360Learning Pricing is also very affordable which fits in the budget of small to midsize organizations too. So, social learning has many benefits for the organizations, some of them are:
1) Better knowledge retention:
When people hear or watch it visually, the chances of learning the concept and retaining it are much higher than doing it all by themselves. Formal learning involves voluntary efforts which are where people tend to procrastinate and even when they learn by themselves, they don’t pay much attention. Hence the chances of knowledge retention are very low in self-learning when compared to social learning. Social learning helps to retain knowledge because our minds are innately inclined to observe things and capture the information.
2) Develop the social skills of your employees:
One of the must-have skills that every manager or leader should have is social skills. Managing a large workforce requires knowing how to communicate with different personalities and getting the best out of them. These social skills are lacking in many modern-day employees as they rarely get the chance to lead a team or communicate with people regularly. So, social learning helps people to improve their social skills as they interact with each other and develop discussion groups in the learning process.
3) Supports different learning behaviors:
Some people prefer to learn through listening, some through watching and few people prefer to learn all by themselves. Social learning supports all these learning types. It promotes peer-to-peer knowledge transfer and collaborative learning for people who prefer to learn it this way. Introverts who are shy and often hesitate to speak out can simply learn by seeing people around the group and listening to their ideas.
4) Saves a lot of energy and time:
You don’t need to put any special effort to foster social learning in the organization. It’s a natural way of learning where people can interact with each other and learn. You don’t need to schedule a specific seminar or event for your employees as it happens naturally. Your employees can learn through each other easily without wasting much time in understanding the concepts.
5) Helps to identify knowledge gaps:
When people learn together, they try to learn the concepts which are hard to understand through their peers. Employees can help each other out and address the knowledge gaps within them. The employees can share the knowledge in a way they understand better. Through this way knowledge gaps of every employee can be addressed easily.
Conclusion:
From the above-mentioned points, we can clearly understand that social learning has a wide range of benefits to offer. Thus, organizations should try to incorporate social learning to maximize the learning process and get better results. We hope this article helps you in identifying the importance of social learning and why you should adopt this for your organization.
