Julie Bellinger, Employee Affairs, Change and Learning & Development Manager at Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham Engine Plant, urges all employers to sit up and take notice of the value that informal adult learning (IAL) brings to businesses of all sizes.
The Learning Revolution
In March 2009, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched The Learning Revolution White Paper, highlighting its commitment to help adults learn for pleasure, and for personal and community development. The White Paper outlines what the whole of Government can do to support IAL, including funding innovative new ideas and projects, helping to broker access to learning, and building a culture of learning.
IAL has many proven benefits to both individual health and wellbeing, and community cohesion, but it can also have a profoundly positive impact for businesses. Informal learning can lead to higher self-esteem, higher morale and innovative thinking, and as a result workers are more productive, hard working and engaged. As The Learning Revolution gains momentum, it is vital for businesses to support and encourage informal learning for its employees, both in and outside the workplace, or risk a de-motivated and frustrated workforce.
Benefits to the business
At the Ford Estate located in Dagenham, we have an informal learning programme called ‘Skills for Life’, which involves an individual skills assessment in English, maths and IT for our employees. We have five tutors who spend approximately 30 minutes with each employee, asking questions and evaluating their capabilities in these three areas. The sessions take place during a normal working day and are delivered line-side, which helps to maintain an informal feel and ensures the worker is not anxious about it beforehand.
Although conversations are usually around work-based scenarios and specific job roles, the help employees receive can assist them in everyday tasks outside the workplace, such as understanding their bills, helping their children with their homework and writing formal letters.
In 2005, we received a three-year £10.1 million Government grant for upskilling employees using a variety of learning methods, and an extra £820,000 was received this year to continue our ‘Skills for Life’ programme. Since the beginning of this year, we have assessed 750 employees and we have improved Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in safety, quality, delivery, morale and environment. An internal assessment was carried out in 2008, three years after we commenced our up-skilling programmes, and so far we’ve seen a 33% increase in production volume, and have exceeded our cost targets on our financial targets. In addition, our assessment shows a 65% reduction in lost time case rate and a 92% reduction in accident severity rate.
Benefits to the individual
Obviously cost savings and higher rates of productivity are important to every business, especially in the current economic climate. But informal adult learning is also about providing staff with opportunities to learn new skills, thereby hopefully improving job satisfaction and reducing staff turnover. In August 2009, we collated feedback from a number of employees who had already had their one-to-one sessions with the ‘Skills for Life’ tutors, and the general response was that learners felt more confident, asked more questions at work and felt they were learning more as a result. Our KPI assessment at the end of 2008 showed a 22% increase in employee satisfaction, and a 0.6% reduction in unplanned absence.
Businesses have a responsibility to not only provide learning opportunities for their staff, but to provide a culture of learning that supports individuals and provides benefits to the local community. Since our upskilling programme was launched, many of our employees have gone out and joined local sports or other extracurricular clubs, or have stepped into more senior or administrative roles in local charities and other organisations.
By engaging in IAL at work, businesses are helping to generate a new willingness, and eagerness to learn. An informal learning programme that is delivered in the right way, that doesn’t intimidate and is achievable and relevant, creates a desire to learn and invokes a will to succeed. Once an employee starts succeeding, their confidence soars and their ambitions grow.
Join the revolution
There is no question that businesses need to provide informal learning opportunities for their employees, or risk losing out in an increasingly competitive business market. The good news is that there are plenty of resources or funding available, both through the Government and other organisations. The better news is that by providing staff with learning opportunities, businesses are improving individual livelihoods and increasing employees’ morale and self-confidence, which will improve productivity and decrease staff turnover for businesses, and enhance local communities.
To join the revolution and become part of the informal learning movement, or to find out more information, please visit thelearningrevolution.ning.com.
First person: Stephen Martin, chief executive of the Clugston Group, understands more than most the value of informal adult learning to businesses.
Stephen recently took part in Channel 4’s ‘Undercover Boss’ in which he ditched the suit and the office and spent 10 days working ‘undercover’ with his employees on site. The experiment gave him the unique opportunity to learn how things worked at a grassroots level, and where things might need changing.
Stephen said: “By taking part in ‘Undercover Boss’, I learnt more about the company and the employees in two weeks than I would have learnt in the office in three years. I got to see for myself what makes the workers tick, what frustrates them, and where their motivation comes from. It was also an opportunity to see where improvements or changes were needed, and we identified a number of issues that have since been addressed.
“This experiment wasn’t all about looking at Clugstons’ management and processes, we were also interested in employees’ overall skills, learning opportunities, job satisfaction and life balance. Informal learning plays a big part in all of this, and I was keen to see how involved and aware the workers were of this less structured and slightly ambiguous means of learning.
“I think what surprised me the most, was just how involved they were in learning new skills outside work already, sometimes without even realising it. Many employees are part of local clubs and charities, helping to organise events and fundraisers. Our HR director, for example, is running a series of workshops in CV writing for local deprived members of the community, including ex-offenders. The types of skills workers are learning as a result – organisational skills, communication skills, problem solving and many others – are absolutely transferrable to the work place and can make a real difference to performance and morale.
“Informal learning benefits both individuals and the business. When people are constantly learning new skills in their day-to-day lives, they are generally more confident and fulfilled, and they bring this motivation and morale to work with them. Learning provides a sense of achievement and pride, and encourages you to do your best in everything. Of course it also means these new skills are brought into the workplace, and they often help stimulate innovative thinking.
“Informal learning also supports social inclusion. I met one worker who was very shy and without a lot of self-confidence, and as a result he wasn’t very interested in formal training and education. With some encouragement however, he was pursuaded to get involved and help out with a local charity group, and as a result he now feels a part of something bigger and his confidence has soared.
“For those businesses that don’t understand the value of encouraging and supporting informal learning for its employees, I think this could be incredibly damaging for them. In my opinion, workers will become disengaged and frustrated, and morale will be low. Before ‘Undercover Boss’, I also didn’t appreciate how important informal learning is for people’s wellbeing and self-esteem. During the project, I met one employee who was incredibly frustrated because he was desperate to be moved around to different sites so he could keep learning new skills and increase his experience. When I asked why this hadn’t happened, his manager informed me it was because this worker was so good they didn’t want to lose him, yet they didn’t understand that by keeping him in one area where he wasn’t able to continue learning, he had become bored, disengaged and was close to leaving the company.
“I learnt a lot of valuable lessons as a result of my experinece on ‘Undercover Boss’ and one of these was how important it is for businesses to support informal learning. Not only does it bring about benefits to the individual and the business through increased self-confidence, morale, innovative thinking, social inclusion and of course new skills, but by getting involved in informal learning, individuals are helping to support the communities they work in, and this can only benefit society as a whole.”
