Matthew Gates 3m 750 #laww
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Employee Learning Throughout The Week
For Employees By Employees
While we are always learning at work or should be, the official dates for Learning At Work Week are May 16 – May 22 though you may find additional sources that put it from May 18 – May 24 or May 15 – May 30th. However long you prefer to keep it going is up to your company. The whole idea of LAWW is to motivate your team to educate their team. In addition to building a stronger and more educated workforce, LAWW encourages employee engagement and communication. The best way to run LAWW is to allow employees to run the week. If you are an employer and want to do something fun for your company, let your employees run sessions and learn from each other. Everyone is different and is interested in teaching different things to others at work. While the topics may stay confined to work, it encourages employees to teach what they know besides work, including meditation, finances, work-life balance, hobbies, communication, self-defense tactics, recycling, public speaking, or anything else. Learning At Work Week encourages employees to learn from other employees and for bosses to learn about the hidden skills and talents of their employees.
The encouragement is to put your employees, those who wish to volunteer to present, into a position where they have the floor and are able to have their voice heard. There should be a dedicated person to ensure there is a smooth flow of employee presentations. Depending on what is being done at work that week, and the number of employees, each presenter should be given at least a half hour to present. This is where others can learn about their co-workers can learn something more about them. Emphasis on LAWW is about creativity and passing on our knowledge of what we know that others may not know.
The ability to allow your employees to teach others is very empowering. Whether you are a small business, a startup, or a large organization, from May 16 – May 22, there is time to give the educational process over to your employees and let them teach some things about life that others may not know. Almost everyone we work are all of different ages, backgrounds, and have had a vastly different amount of experience than ourselves. To learn from them and understand more about them can teach us a lot about our co-workers and engage conversation for years to come. Companies for this week are encouraged to participate in such an exciting activity. Your employees matter and to allow them to have the floor to present their ideas and creativity goes a long way to show them the appreciation they deserve. To ensure the week does happen, it does require a few volunteers to step up in order to make it possible, but that is just another way to empower your employees.
Why Take Part In LAWW
- Changing attitudes to learning and work
- More positive and improved perceptions of learning and development both at business and individual level, increased motivation and productivity
- Greater awareness of opportunities to learn
- Increased knowledge and understanding of the opportunities for learning and development all year round and what they can deliver for the business and individual
- Greater employee engagement with learning
- Employees switched back onto learning and motivated, increased take up of learning and development opportunities
- Informing business & learning and development strategies
- Stimulating and collating feedback, ideas and perspectives that inform future planning
- Opportunities to discover and recognise internal talent
- Drawing on employees own knowledge, passions and interests to create engaging activities and wider sharing and collaboration in the workplace
- Greater recognition and valuing of different ways to learn in the workplace
- Encouraging a broader perspective on how learning and development happens and how employees can take advantage of new ways to learn – from traditional class-room based training through social media to team meets for generating and sharing learning
- Highlighting business priorities, agendas and addressing change
- Providing a platform to focus on and share important information about the business and its direction and using it as an opportunity to engage employees with different agendas and policies in a interactive and stimulating way
- Addressing workplace silos and bridging information gaps
- Bringing employees from different parts of the business together or partner organisations in to learn from each other
If you haven’t heard of LAWW or haven’t made it happen, you really should do something now! Read more about it: https://www.campaign-for-learning.org.uk/news/about-learning-at-work-week
(
