Learning at Work Week: Making your organisation stronger

What comes to mind when you’re told it’s Learning at Work Week?

Sitting in a classroom being trained in a new skill? Or do you think ‘I learn something every day while I’m doing my job’?

As in most of today’s workplaces, at the BBC there’s a mix of formal and self-directed learning. The formal takes place in classrooms and studios - and its value is proved by the glowing feedback that the BBC Academy’s trainers receive. 

Those formal learning experiences are just one (albeit important) part of how everyone learns. There’s also self-directed learning: going online to find how to do something, asking the person at the desk next to you or checking on a procedure with your boss. 

An organisation's attitude to learning depends on its culture, which is one the issues discussed in The Wealth of Humans, a book by Ryan Avent, a journalist from The Economist.

Avent begins with a fairly conventional argument: that tech trends have resulted in a hollowing out of what organisations do for themselves. More functions are contracted out; globalisation allows control of supply chains stretching all the way to China; and the value of an organisation lies more and more in intangibles such as intellectual property rather than material assets.

In the new world of work, Avent says, an organisation need to focus on its core competencies, which are those that can’t be farmed out: corporate strategy, product design and key bits of engineering for a tech business for instance. These are the things that define what a organisation is. In Avent’s view “firms are information-processing systems – and, increasingly, that is all they are.”

It’s easy to see how Avent’s analysis fits with the BBC. Ages ago there was an initiative in the corporation called Producer Choice. It gave producers responsibility for their own programme budgets, allowing them to choose their favourite camera crews instead of having to use BBC staff crews, for instance. Other changes, such as the use of indies to make programmes, have pointed in the same direction. And now there’s BBC Studios, which competes against indies for commissions from the BBC and can offer its services outside the BBC too. 

The idea of these changes is not to lessen the BBC, but rather to concentrate its work on its core competencies, which are around making careful and skilled judgments about editorial and production options. However those priorities can best be served is the way to go.

So what does that kind of focus mean for learning within the BBC or other organisations? Well, Avent says that much of the value of an organisation today lies in the shared knowledge of its workforce. He calls it social capital. In the BBC, that would be everything from editorial values to the way people are hired, how you get a computer or what kind of dress code is expected. Some of it is codified, some of it remains unspoken; some needs to be learnt formally in a classroom and some you just absorb by being part of the organisation. 

Social capital is unique to each organisation and can’t be bought or sold. It’s dependent on context: outside of the BBC, knowledge of the BBC’s structures or practices isn’t going to be of much value. That’s different from human capital which is the collection of skills that an individual acquires and which they take with them from job to job. 

Anything that helps increase both human and social capital is key to an organisation’s success today, according to Avent’s thesis. When I learn a new piece of software, I add to my own human capital but that makes me a more useful member of the organisation. When I learn about the way things are done in the BBC, that contributes to the value of the BBC by increasing its pool of social capital.

Avent’s analysis doesn’t favour either formal or self-directed learning but highlights the value of both. The theory of social capital, he says, “can help explain lots of phenomena that might otherwise seem peculiar”, such as why we still work together physically when so much can be done remotely online. It’s because social capital is enhanced by having people “bump against each other and swim within the culture.” The same would apply to getting people together in a classroom to learn. 

The idea of social capital also explains the value of self-directed learning, as another way to strengthen an organisation’s culture. That process “drives success only because most workers learn and accept the culture as the way things within the firm ought to be done.” 

Social capital, then, is the glue that holds an organisation together and from which its culture emerges. The same workers doing the same work as freelancers wouldn’t be as effective as they are as staff members, Avent argues, because being inside an organisation implies an acceptance of its norms. To put it negatively, “a salary …is just as much a fee for the worker’s obedience as for their labour”.

So have a good Learning at Work Week. Whether you’re absorbing and contributing to your organisation’s social capital, or topping up your own human capital, they’re both critical sources of value in today’s information-centred world.