How do you learn the skills you need to succeed in your career? While it may be tempting to learn from family or friends, learning from your peers, especially in a remote work environment, is the best way to advance your career. Many companies are now building online communities where their remote employees can share best practices, ideas, and tips with one another. It helps the employees learn from the skills and expertise of their peers. It helps them advance their careers by learning new skills and honing the ones they already have. Learning from peers is a great way to learn new skills and advance your career.
This blog will look at different ways to learn from your peers and how to use the tools available to you to make sure that you pick up the right skills and avoid looking like a novice.
Why Should You Learn From Your Peers During Remote Work?
Here are some of the reasons why you should learn from your peers when working remotely.
- Increases employee engagement
- Fosters collaboration
- Boost employee morale
- Polishes employees skills
- Make new employees feel right at home
When you start learning from peers in your organizations, it improves team cohesion and creates a strong bond. As a result, new employees feel comfortable and quickly settle into a new organization. Businesses that embrace peer-to-peer earning sees a significant improvement in employee collaboration. This can also have a positive effect on employee morale and overall productivity. In addition to this, it also provides them an opportunity to hone their skills.
6 Ways To Learn From Your Peers
Here are six ways you can use it to learn from your peers in a remote working Environment.
1. Create a Learning Environment and Culture
Even though most of your employees must be working remotely, you need to develop a learning culture and environment to foster peer-to-peer learning. Your organizational culture should encourage idea and knowledge sharing. To do this, you will first have to make learning an integral part of your organizational culture. More importantly, you must provide incentives to employees who learn more than others. A learning culture is where creative ideas thrive and help employees realize their full potential.
2. Arrange Networking Events
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear about the word networking event? If you thought about businesses sharing their business cards, you are not alone. Most people think of networking events the same way. There is much more to networking events than exchanging business cards. Networking events are a rich source of new ideas and fresh perspectives on particular topics. Organize online seminars to help employees learn from experts or arrange internal networking events on zoom to allow your new employees to benefit from your seasoned employees’ skills, knowledge, and expertise. This will build a stronger connection among your team members, and they will exhibit better coordination and collaboration when working on projects together.
3. Reward Unique Perspectives
One of the most significant advantages of having a diverse workforce is giving you access to new perspectives. When your remote employees come from different backgrounds, have different skillsets, and think differently, you will have multiple perspectives on a particular topic. Instead of discouraging your employees from challenging the stereotypes and sharing their unique ideas, you should give them The freedom to present their ideas and perspectives on a particular topic. This will create acceptance of new ideas and resistance to change in your organization. Your organization will slowly but surely become open-minded. As a result, your organization will be more creative and less fearful. This would positively impact the productivity and efficiency of your organization, just like a decision to buy a dedicated server.
Best of all, it enables your organization to look at a problem from different angles and find a perfect solution. All this can give you a competitive advantage and even make you an industry leader that other businesses in your industry might look up to for inspiration.
4. Designate Experienced Employees as Mentors For New Employees
One of the most significant issues new employees face when joining a new organization is an alien environment. They don’t know how things work. That is where assigning an experienced employee with a fresh employee might come in handy. This will make the employee onboarding experience easier and allow them the time to adjust. Since your seasoned employees know the ropes and have been through the same process, they can take them under their wings and guide them through different stages. They will give new employees a direction to move in and guidelines to follow. In short, this will make the first few months for new employees in the organization less bumpy.
5. Have Online Group Reflection Conversations
Have you ever been a part of a brainstorming session? If yes, you might be familiar with the drill. It is an excellent source of sharing ideas. On the flip side, group reflection sessions can help your team members reflect on their past performance. These group reflection conversations also highlight some of the shortcomings and areas that need more improvement. Most importantly, it is also an excellent way for employees to learn from the mistakes of other employees, so they don’t end up repeating the same mistakes again and again.
6. Take Feedback
Let’s say you have taken all the steps mentioned above, but you don’t know which ones are most effective? That is when you should take feedback from your employees who are part of all the exercises. This will give you a clear idea of what is working and what is not. More specifically, what they like and what they don’t. You can also adjust your learning and training programs and create maximum impact with your training programs with employee feedback. There is no point in sticking to a training program that no longer strikes a chord with your employee or helps them learn. There are plenty of tools that will let you collect anonymous feedback.
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