Improving Workplace Learning: Learning Cultures the key
THINKPIECE | Phil Hodkinson, Professor, Lifelong Learning, University of Leeds, UK for TAFE NSW ICVET
For both employers and workers, improving learning at work can be important. In Australia, workplace practitioners have a vital role in bringing this about. There are many ways in which it can be done, but also some serious difficulties, some of which may not be possible to overcome. Recent research in the UK, done by myself with others, helps illustrate the difficulties, and also points towards an important but often neglected additional approach, which I call improving the learning culture of the workplace.
Barriers to effective workplace learning
Key Points
- Where the learning activity disrupts the primary purpose of the workplace
- what workers want and what their employers want is not always the same
- Not all workers want the same things or learn the same way - this may not suit the employer/the established working practices.
Let’s get some of the difficulties out of the way first. In all workplaces, any learning done by the workers always has to take second place to the main functions of the firm – for private and increasingly for public enterprises, this means achieving profitability – looking after the bottom line. Any learning activity which disrupts this primary purpose will always be very difficult to justify to employers, and therefore to provide. For example, a young trainee in England was learning to work in the horse industry. She worked in a stable that ran rides for tourists. Quite often, planned learning had to be abandoned because a ride had to be taken out. More generally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to give workers training provision outside the workplace, because employers cannot release them from productive work.
It is often claimed that worker learning is essential to the success of a firm, but the evidence says otherwise. Factors such as the stock market (for private firms) the buoyancy of the economy, the market for the products or services being provided and, for public services, funding and State or national government-set targets, all influence productivity and financial success more than the learning of workers. For several years in the late 1990s, the Rover car company had amongst the best worker learning provision in the UK. This did not prevent the eventual bankruptcy of the firm.
A second problem that is often under-estimated by managers and employers, is that there are very good reasons why what workers want and what their employers want is not always the same. Good management can and does increase areas of commonality, but differences often remain. Furthermore, not all workers want the same things. All workers have differing histories and preferences, so that each person’s dispositions towards workplace learning are different. Those personal dispositions influence what and how they learn at work.
Case Study:One school where we researched introduced a staff development scheme, based on the setting and monitoring of annual learning targets, agreed between a worker and his/her line manager. In that agreement, employer priorities and objectives dominated. The result was that many staff went through the process, but without any belief or commitment. They learned how to stay out of trouble with the line manager, and how to set targets and provide evidence in ways that caused minimal disruption to their existing practices.
In the jargon, they were being strategically compliant. Such staff learned very little of what the employer wanted them to learn. Other staff were more enthusiastic, and were able to use the scheme more productively. In the same study, we also interviewed teachers who wanted further professional development, but their preferred learning was not permitted by the employer, either because it did not fit the school and government’s current development plans, or because it was thought to have been too disruptive to established working practices.
Ways of Improving Workplace Learning
Key Points
- Interventions must be tailored to the specific workplace and workers
- PD that focuses on the learners only changes the work context and practices only marginally
- Most learning at work happens through the everyday working practices
- workplace learning can be improved by changing the ways people work
Despite these and other more localised difficulties, there are many ways in which learning at work can be improved, and workplace practitioners in Australia are already employing lots of them. Professional development schemes do work for some workers for some of the time. Personal guidance and support, groups learning sessions, work-based problem solving and access to courses outside the workplace can all be very valuable. To be effective, any intervention must be tailored to the specific workplace and the particular workers concerned. Nothing works in all situations, or even for all people in the same situation.
All these approaches have one thing in common. Their central focus of attention is on the workers who are doing the learning: helping them, supporting them, and providing them with learning challenges. They all take place within and need to be closely related to particular working contexts and practices. However, they only change those working contexts and practices in marginal ways.
There is nothing wrong with such approaches, but they risk overlooking what is perhaps the most important thing we know about workplace learning. Research study after research study all show the same thing – that most learning at work happens through the everyday working practices of the workers. That is, the biggest influence on learning at work is the work itself. It follows that a major way in which workplace learning can be improved is to change the ways in which people work. Our research in the UK shows some of the ways in which this can be done. In order to explain these approaches, it is first necessary to think about the workplace and learning in a particular way.
Learning cultures at work
Key Points
- Every workplace has a learning culture
- Working practices are influenced by outside factors, eg government regulation,
- Improving the learning culture improves workplace learning
- learning is greatest in an expansive learning culture
When people work, they are participating in the practices of the workplace. As well as doing the specified tasks, this also includes fitting in with the overall approaches of the firm, and with those of the particular section where they work. These practices are not just determined by the employers and managers. Groups of workers develop particular ways of behaving. It is well known that many workers in predominantly hard, physical and often male contexts, like miners or building site workers, will regularly breach some of the health and safety regulations. Any member of the team has to go along with such established breaches, or find ways to deviate from them that will not alienate colleagues. The practices of a workplace are rooted in the history of the workplace. They can and do change, but changes are often gradual and unplanned, and planned changes often lead to unintended consequences. These working practices are influenced by factors from outside the firm, such as national or state government regulation, and the norms and expectations of the wider communities within which the work is located. Increasingly, working practices are being influenced by globalised international competition and fashions in management approaches.
These complex workplace practices are a major influence on learning at work. Every workplace can be understood to have a learning culture, strongly affected by those practices. By learning culture, I mean cultural practices that influence learning. The learning culture in a workplace makes some learning easy, other learning possible, some learning very difficult, and other learning impossible. It follows that a very effective way of improving workplace learning is to improve the learning culture, making desirable learning more likely. This entails making changes to existing working conditions and practices. Before I address how this can be done, I first need to explain what differentiates a good learning culture from one that is not so good. Our research shows that the most effective learning cultures are synergistic, and that opportunities to learn are greatest when a learning culture is expansive. I will explain expansive learning cultures first.
Expansive and Restrictive Learning Cultures
Case Study: Research by Fuller and Unwin (reported in Evans et al, 2006) compared apprenticeships in four different steel works firms in the UK. They found that the quality of learning varied significantly between the firms, despite the fact that all were part of the same government apprenticeship scheme. They showed that one reason for this variation was what they termed the greater expansiveness of the learning environment, by which they meant something very similar to my term, learning culture.
Put simply, the apprentices in the most successful firm had a far greater range of learning opportunities within the learning culture of the firm, than was the case for the less successful schemes. In this firm, apprentices worked in four different parts of the firm, rotating between departments over a two-year period. They learned in varied contexts, and met different working practices and challenges. These apprentices also attended an off the job college course. Importantly, the employers and senior workers valued this course. The link with the college had been long-established, and many of the firms’ employees had been through the course themselves.
Thus, attending the course was seen as a normal and important part of the learning culture within the firm. This in turn meant that the apprentices took it seriously. Another characteristic of this particular firm was that employers and senior workers all recognised that helping apprentices learn was an important aspect of their work, so that helping apprentices was a normal part of the learning culture. Fuller and Unwin also found examples of the older workers learning from the young apprentices – for example in relation to information technology.
Case Study: At the other end of the spectrum, one of the firms studied had a very restrictive learning culture. Here the apprentice only worked on one relatively simple job. He learned this very quickly, and became proficient at it. His employer was very happy, because he had become a productive member of the firm very quickly. His learning had cost the firm very little. The problem was that his learning largely stopped once he had mastered this simple task. This was fine for the firm at the time, but left him ill-equipped for any future changes of work.
Key Points
- supports learning in varied contexts and practices
- employers and seniors value the learning and see assisting learning as an important aspect of their work
- learning is better where staff routinely learn from each other
I found similar differences along the expansive – restrictive continuum in the study of schoolteachers’ workplace learning. This study showed that learning was stronger in those departments where teachers routinely learned from each other.
Much of the work of school teaching is done alone – in your classroom with your class. Despite this, in two of the departments we studied, teachers routinely discussed work issues, for example at break or lunchtimes. The art teachers often walked through each other’s studios, looking at children’s work, whilst the musicians often listened to what other classes were doing, for short periods of time.
This collaborative activity greatly enhanced their workplace learning, making the learning cultures in art and music departments more expansive than the others we studied, in this respect. Furthermore, the music departmnent explicitly focussed on teacher learning. The teachers in it deliberately sought out new challenges and new ways to learn. This explicit focus on teacher learning made the learning culture of the music department even more expansive than that of art.
All this shows that one important way of improving learning at work is to make the learning culture more expansive. This may be particularly important for experienced workers, who need new opportunities and new challenges to continue learning. Before discussing how to make a learning culture more expansive, I need to explain the value of synergistic learning cultures.
Synergistic Learning Cultures
Key Points
- Learning is more likely to be effective if there is synergy between the factors and forces that contribute to the learning - eg regular discussion, supportive management, willingness to collaborate and learn part of the culture
Making a learning culture more expansive increases opportunities for workers to learn, and the likelihood that they will learn. The learning they then do is more likely to be effective if the various factors and forces that contribute to the learning are largely pulling in the same direction. That is, there is some synergy between them. On the other hand, when a significant number of those factors and forces are pulling in different directions, so that they are in conflict with the intended learning, then that learning is less likely to be effective.
In order to explain this rather abstract idea, it is easiest to start with examples where conflicts risk undermining learning. Suppose we want mine-workers to learn safer ways of working. We could provide health and safety courses and give on the job guidance and advice. However, other pressures might undermine this learning. For example, if existing unsafe working practices are regarded as important parts of belonging to the community of miners, even miners who were individually prepared to change their ways of working might resist the learning. Also, if employer targets could most easily be met by breaching some safety procedures, this might take precedence of health and safety in practice. Such conflicts between the working culture and the intended learning would not absolutely prevent the learning of new health and safety practices, but they would make the success of such learning much less likely. For that learning to be effective, it would need to be reinforced by changes in actual working practices. This might entail modifying work targets and, if the firm was unionised, working closely with the Trades Union.
Case Study: An example of lack of synergy arose in our study of schoolteachers’ workplace learning. The head of the history department wanted his team to work much more closely together, partly so that they would learn more effectively off each other. In order to do this, he knew that he had to make changes to the existing individualistic working practices. Firstly, he arranged for most of the history classes to be taught in classrooms adjacent to each other, increasing the likelihood of informal team member contacts. Secondly, he managed to replace several part-time teachers with one full-timer, who would be more obviously a member of the team.
Both these changes reduced conflicts in the learning culture of his department, which were preventing collaborative learning. However, this was not enough. Not only did two of his existing and long-standing team members continue to work alone, but the new teacher appointed was also very individualistic and non-collaborative in her work. Also, despite getting the classrooms adjacent, he did not have a social space where the team could meet together at breaks and lunchtimes – unlike the more collaborative art and music departments. The teachers in his team dispersed to one of two different staff rooms at those times, rather than relaxing (and learning) together.
Case Study: Yet another example of the importance of synergy was a government scheme to make teachers learn how to use computers in their teaching. In one school, this was done through a compulsory one day training workshop for almost all staff, using a nationally laid down curriculum and materials, and followed by further specified activities. The cultural conflicts that undermined this work were several: many teachers resented the compulsory nature of the training; the training package and approaches did not seem to recognise the huge differences in their existing computer expertise; the materials with which they had to work did not always fit with some of their subject specialisations, and when they all tried to log on, on the training day, the system crashed. The most important problem was that very few of the teachers had computers in the classrooms where they worked. The initiative was designed on the assumption that teachers needed to learn how to use computers before they were provided.
Our research suggested things would have been better if they had been done the other way round, and the computers provided first. The approach should then have been closely tailored to the existing working practices of teachers in their departments. The initiative would have been more successful if the training had not been compulsory, and if it had been planned to make more gradual and progressive learning interventions, starting first with those teachers most willing and able to take on the challenges entailed.
Case study: It was the music department where teacher learning was most effective, and this was because most of the factors and forces within the department learning culture were synergistic. The team regularly met together at breaks and lunchtimes, and often discussed their work. They regularly moved in and out of each other’s classes, providing an audience for some student performances. The head of department explicitly promotedteacher learning, and gave a very strong lead to the department in this direction – both by working to learn new things himself, and by insisting that the others did too. Finally, the team members themselves wanted to learn new things, including off each other. When a new member of staff was appointed, willingness to work like this was an important criteria in selection.
It is important to remember that restricted learning can be very effective, though limited. In the example of the worst steelworks apprenticeship in the Fuller and Unwin study, the young apprentice learned how to do his one simple task very effectively. For this purpose, the learning culture was highly synergistic. The problem was that, as an apprentice, he should have been learning much more. This raises a final important issue with regard to improving workplace learning – the question of value.
The Value of Workplace Learning
Key Points
- Workers can learn poor working practices in a workplace with poor practices
- learning may challenge the values and preferences of some stakeholders
- those with most power are more likely to get their way
Thus far, I have written as if workplace learning is always a good thing, but this is far from the case. It is well known, for example, that many workers learn poor working practices very effectively, if they are in a workplace where such practices are normal and unchallenged. In one research project, we were studying the ways in which trainee nursery (kindergarten) nurses learned. As part of their course they were taught about the importance of being non-racist – but in their workplace placements many of them encountered racist attitudes. In both learning cultures, trainees learned to accept that working in nurseries was low laid and low status women’s work, reinforcing gender stereotypes. They also learned to accept high levels of stress, through what is sometimes called emotional labour. That is, they had to suppress their own feelings, of annoyance, distaste or even revulsion, always putting the children first. Though not strictly a workplace, many prisoners learn to be better criminals when in jail.
This question of the value of workplace learning raises issues of value for whom? The head of history wanted to work collaboratively. Some of his team did not. Different staff in the same school department reacted quite differently to a newly introduced staff development scheme.
Sometimes, a State or National government may want learning that other stakeholders do not, and people generally may have views (possibly conflicting) about some forms of workplace learning. For example, many but by no means all parents might want non-racist nursery nursing provision. Sometimes, when most of those involved equally value the same learning, there is no problem. Indeed, this shared valuing is part of what I have called synergy in the learning culture.
However, some very important learning may challenge the values and preferences of some stakeholders. In such situations, those with most power are more likely to get their way, provided conflicts in the learning culture can be reduced, bypassed or overcome.
Enhancing Workplace Learning Cultures
Key Points
- Learning at work can be enhanced by to make the learning culture more expansive and/or more synergistic.
- The presence of workplace practitioners is changing workplace cultures and can further change the learning cultures
- Their work may be more effective if such cultural changes were an explicit part of their job.
All this means that one way of improving learning at work is through modifying the learning culture, by making it more expansive and/or more synergistic. The presence of workplace practitioners is already changing workplace cultures, where they operate, and such practitioners can further change the learning cultures in those workplaces. Much of what they already do contributes to this, even if that was not the explicit purpose. However, it is possible that their work could be more effective if they were to make such cultural changes an explicit part of the job. I finish with a few general guidelines about how to do that.
1). Remember that all workplaces are different. Tailor any interventions to the specifics of existing practices. Concentrate on what is feasible and possible, rather than idealistic goals.
2). See analysing the learning culture as an important part of your job. This need not be either time consuming, or difficult. Take time to find out the answers to these important questions, through observation and informal conversations:
- what are the barriers to learning in this workplace?
- can any of them be overcome?
- are their any valuable changes that can realistically be made?
- what are the possibilities for learning here?
- what valuable learning can be easily enhanced?
3). Work with others. Most of the changes to a learning culture will lie beyond your direct influence. Can you help employers, middle managers, Trade Union leaders or groups of workers introduce valuable changes? Your presence in a workplace can be a valuable catalyst to the improvement of learning, partly through influencing the actions of others.
4). Finally, be realistic. In almost all workplaces, there will be important and desirable changes that are unachievable. For example, whether or not collaborative worker learning is possible will depend not only on worker attitudes but also on established working practices focussed on achieving the bottom line of the firm.
All this combines in an approach which I describe as principled pragmatism. Principled because you have thought hard about what should be done and why, and pragmatic, because your actions have been adapted to the specific circumstances, and what is achievable. A key part of a principled approach is to be aware of the significance of expansive and synergistic learning cultures. Part of the pragmatism is finding ways to enhance them.
Reference
EVANS, K., HODKINSON, P., RAINBIRD, H. & UNWIN, L. with FULLER, A., HODKINSON, H., KERSH, N. MUNRO, A. & SENKER, P. (2006) Improving Workplace Learning (London: Routledge).