Informal learning: doing more with less?

Under a damp blanket of dire economic news and facing very real tightening of budgets, HR practitioners are making hard decisions about how to allocate scarce resources.  It often seems natural to talk about trying to do “more with less” – the notion that we’re all going to have to buckle down and figure out how to meet ongoing business needs with reduced headcount or gaps in critical roles.

During a recent Cornerstone OnDemand webcast, learning guru Elliot Masie asked attendees to consider whether doing more with less is even desirable, assuming it’s possible.  Masie noted that “if you can show them that you can do more with less, you’ll never get more!  So the problem then becomes you can never go back for more.”

Naturally we cannot snap our fingers and get more from less or we’d do it year-round in good times and in lean.  The way we can do more with less is through transformative technologies.  Things that come along only occasionally and change the way we do business.

It strikes me that Enterprise 2.0 is one such transformative technology with the potential to fundamentally expand how we engage in employee training and development (among other talent management areas) – especially around how we capture organizational knowledge and encourage informal learning.  Learning strategist Jay Cross penned the book on informal learning and he advances the notion that 80% of training budgets are spent on structured, formal learning (in the classroom, e-learning) but equally 80% of what people actually learn is informal or social (on-the-job, through mentors, etc).

The reason this 80/80 rule is so intriguing is that it suggests that we can, in fact, do more with less when it comes to organizational learning if we can systematically access that 80% informal learning component.  Enterprise social networking technologies like Cornerstone Connect don’t make informal learning happen – as Jay Cross points out, social learning happens all the time whether we like it or not.  But technology has proven to be very good at systematically organizing, codifying, amplifying, and enabling business and people processes.

The promise of Enterprise 2.0 in informal learning is the ability to systematically tap into meaningful organizational knowledge that swirls around every company all the time.  And by doing this we can help our employees to do their jobs better every day.  This is akin to generating electricity from the wind that blows around us every day – it’s harvesting an under-utilized resource for clear benefit.  For HR practitioners, and in combination with training activities already being delivered, that’s doing more with less.

Charles Coy is the Director of Product Marketing for Cornerstone OnDemand