What is Social Learning?

What is Social Learning, and why you should adopt it in the Workplace

Social learning has increased in popularity over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down. It brings significant benefits to the workplace, including opportunities to learn and share knowledge, build relationships, and promote collaboration between employees.

If you’re interested in using social learning but aren’t sure where to start, this guide will help you explore ways to incorporate social learning techniques into your organization or business and reap the benefits of improved employee performance.

Social learning is knowledge, skills, and attitudes developed through participation in social life. In other words, it is interpersonal learning through cooperation and collaboration.

Social learning is a form of informal learning that occurs when employees share ideas, information, and knowledge. While social learning often occurs informally, it can also be structured through corporate-sponsored programs like mentoring or virtual communities.

Whether you're trying to reduce turnover, improve productivity or boost innovation, social learning can help by offering opportunities for employees to develop new skills and better grasp complex challenges.

Bandura’s social learning theory.

The social learning theory by psychologist Albert Bandura states that individuals observe, imitate, and duplicate actions that other people show. According to Bandura’s social learning theory, people learn from one another through observation and imitation.

Social learning is especially useful for improving performance because it allows individuals to share information and resources. Social learning has two main components in business: self-modeling and vicarious reinforcement.

With self-modeling, an individual learns by identifying with a particular person or idea. For example, if someone is trying to learn a new language in many places, provided they have learned on their own, they might seek out someone proficient in that language (self-model) and study them while they speak.

The social learning theory is extremely beneficial for those wishing to enhance the potential for training success within an organization, especially when comparing traditional approaches against those using social learning principles. It is also applicable across various situations such as marketing and advertising, healthcare, education, etc.

Social learning is important because it gives great results if you use it correctly. First, your employees will be able to communicate more effectively and easily due to their enhanced communication skills. They will also be able to work better together and get along better with customers and co-workers.

Social learning isn’t limited to just adults. Children also learn through modeling. If you want your child to be more respectful, teach him how to greet his elders by asking him questions about what he sees when he watches you talk respectfully to your boss or family.

Bandura’s four principles of social learning

Successful social learning is based on four key principles; they include the following:

Attention

According to Bandura, attention is an important factor of social learning. When individuals are not paying attention, they are less likely to learn new behaviors.

When an individual is paying attention, they can take in information, apply it and then practice new skills or behaviors.

Retention

Attention is important because brains have a limited capacity to hold information.

If we don’t make room for new things, we won’t be able to learn anything new. Retention can be enhanced through repetition and practice of something you've learned. If you keep doing something repeatedly, you'll retain it even better!

Reproduction

One of Bandura’s principles of social learning is reproduction, which simply means that people often model their behavior after one another.

If your workplace stresses social learning, it can help enhance creativity and knowledge sharing among employees.

Motivation

According to renowned psychologist and social learning pioneer Albert Bandura, People can only learn when they’re motivated. Workers who are intrinsically motivated (motivated from within) are more likely to get involved and take ownership of their learning.

They will strive to improve their performance because they want their performance to improve, not because they fear punishment or want a reward.

Why does social learning matter?

Social learning can unlock untapped potential and opportunities for employees to be socially active participants in learning communities.

This happens when organizations invest in platforms, practices, and policies that explicitly emphasize social learning behaviors as a core value that supports organizational performance and impact.

A business can only benefit from inspired, motivated, and empowered employees to make decisions. Employees who feel they matter and want to make a difference.

They can get there by being able to learn at their own pace, taking ownership of their development, and socializing with like-minded peers around common interests.

So start implementing social learning today because it is no longer just a means of collaboration but a way of creating happier, more engaged employees. That’s what truly matters!

Enterprises and social learning

More companies are using social learning tools in the workplace, and it’s easy to see why. With these programs, employees can research projects and collaborate with co-workers in real-time using familiar platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

For enterprises, social learning makes it easier for employees to get work done without requesting help from the IT department or filling out boring online training forms.

Many see it as a fad, and others view it as a competitor to traditional education methods. Let’s look at why you should adopt social learning in your company.

Benefits of social learning in the workplace

Social learning creates a better environment

Our social learning environment helps your company as a whole by connecting employees and departments.

By expanding your existing workplace relationships, you’ll help create a stronger community of coworkers. This works because of bottom-up and top-down factors: each individual learns something new from their peers, but they also teach their superiors things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Avoid information overload

The biggest advantage of social learning is that it helps you avoid information overload. Through internal and external sources, there is an endless supply of information. Social learning helps you avoid one source overwhelming you with too much information by making sure everyone is working from a shared foundation of knowledge.

Social learning helps create healthy competition.

In many instances, competition is what drives people to do their best. And if everyone around you is doing well (and winning), there’s even more motivation for you to perform well too.

So social learning can create healthy competition between workers that makes everyone better.

Social learning leads to better results.

Social learning is more fun than sitting in a classroom and leads to better results. Employees aren’t passive recipients of information so they can learn from each other and you.

This makes them more likely to internalize that knowledge and use it to help your company succeed. There are statistics to back up the effectiveness of social learning. In other words, not only will you see improved retention, but you’ll see better results through retained employees.

Social learning promotes constructivism.

From a constructivist perspective, learning occurs through activities that allow you to build knowledge and understanding.

If a person who has learned how to play piano tries to teach someone else, they won't be able to do it as effectively if they just describe the notes on which keys. However, if they pick up an instrument and use their hand as a model for playing those notes, they can more effectively demonstrate where they need their pupil's hands and fingers to go.

In both examples, social learning promotes constructivism by helping learners identify what's important about an activity and explore those elements rather than just performing repetitive drills with no purpose other than repetition itself.

Social learning improves communication.

One surprising benefit of social learning is improved communication; because you’re teaching each other and creating a dialogue, it forces you to explain what you understand.

You may learn things about someone else’s point of view that will cause you to change yours or vice versa.

While working together can improve communication, it also creates a trusting bond between colleagues; they know their ideas won’t be used against them by their peers.

How to adopt social learning in the workplace

There are many ways to adopt social learning in the workplace, but here are a few considerations you might want to keep in mind: You can start with free or low-cost options like blogs, wikis, and collaborative writing tools.

And don’t forget about online tutorials and how-to videos; just ensure your employees know how to identify good information from bad.

Social learning features available on TheLearning LAB LMS Platform

Several social learning features on TheLearning LAB LMS Platform make it possible for you to enhance your employee’s on-the-job skills and knowledge.

This includes tools like quizzes, video feedback, screen recording, webinars, live events, digital events, interactive content, templates, a sharable library, and gamification tools that allow easy collaboration and makes it easy for companies to build a culture-sharing environment among their employees.

Conclusion: What is Social Learning

The use of social learning in the workplace is an easy way to help you maximize your time and resources while fostering teamwork within your organization.

Overall, the benefits of social learning should be reason enough for companies to explore the possibility of implementing it into their corporate strategy.

What is Social Learning?