Learning and Teaching Organisation

If you are not constantly learning, you are losing out to an organisation that is …

The idea for this proposal came from the fact that there are things I need to learn and embrace to help me be better at my job.

A while ago I came up with a list of areas of ‘learning’ in which I need to get everything from a brief overview to a deep understanding. Many areas were technical, some were more practical and for me more difficult because they are, if not outside, at least at the edge of my comfort zone. I have been working through this list recently and will continue to do so going forward.

If I as a typical employee in a regular job have realised how much I don’t know and how much I need to learn, do others think the same about themselves? Could we all benefit from additional learning? Funnily enough on a daily basis we are surrounded by people who know stuff we don’t, but that we could benefit from knowing.

I think it would be a great idea for all organisations to become a Learning and Teaching Organisation.

Why can’t the company allocate a time period (2 hours?) on a regular basis (fortnightly, monthly?) for our staff (managers only? Supervisors? everyone?) to optionally either learn or teach something?

It could be myself and a couple of others sitting with ??? to learn how he optimises product and how he overcomes daily scheduling of production problems. It could be ??? and a few others sitting with ??? in Accounts to learn about how credit cards and invoices are reconciled. It could be ??? and ??? taught by myself how to do SQL queries. It could be a group brainstorming about the current disrupters such as AI and Machine Learning and what will be the benefits and issues for us as a company?. It could be any individual or group sitting with someone and learning about something.

Some ideas about things that could be taught are:

Part of your own job
An industry best practice
A specific technology or skill
A particular methodology or book
Our products
Certain customer organisations
Company standards
Company techniques
Health and safety
HR related information
Company disciplines
Rules and regulations
Selling techniques
Customer Service techniques
Lean / TQM / TOC manufacturing
I could go on, but you see where I am going with this.

Learning is beneficial and so it teaching. I think it would make for a better educated, more cohesive, more confident, more empathetic workforce with much better knowledge of the organisation as a whole and their colleagues roles within it.

What’s not to like ?