I read an insightful paper in July. The Christensen Institute had been looking at the relationships between students and their successes. In the report – Lessons in how to build students’ social capital through career-connected learning – they come up with interesting research which supports the idea that students in networks will benefit from engagement in more social activity.

I was interested to see how it might relate to the workplace, especially when there were 10 specific lessons learned from the study which would translate into workplace learning. I’ve edited these to produce 10 guidelines for workplace leaning:

1. Stick with relationship outcomes: Use relationship data to develop goals and measure progress.
2. Audit your current practices: Look for untapped opportunities to strengthen employees’ social capital within existing workplace activities.
3. Prepare to build, not just buy: Given extensive off-the-shelf content, allocate time and resources for social capital curation and content editing.
4. Honour relational norms and values: Adapt your approaches to both culture and context.
5. Incorporate immersive experiences: Pair social capital concepts with practice and opportunities to build real-life relationships.
6. Skills and access both matter: To seed positive interactions, develop communication skills alongside access to relationships.
7. Prime colleagues to share their social capital: Shifting employees’ mindsets can orient them to build relationships and share resources.
8. Source social capital across your enterprise: Individual social capital is a critical, but limited, lever for scale.
9. Embed social capital into systems: Enthusiastic practitioners foster change, but infrastructure maintains it.
10. Benchmark collective progress: Communities of practice build practitioner confidence.

There is strong evidence that social capital in the workplace can predict performance, engagement, and well-being, so the benefits of developing learning approaches in this way are both clear and reported. I’m going to ruminate on these more; there is something here about social learning which is more than a platform, system, or learning offer and need to understand how it relates to the other learning strategies I suggest.

What are your thoughts – should we be looking at this from a workplace learning perspective?