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As an organization, you need a structure that creates the broadest capacity for making connections.
— George Siemens, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI), Athabasca University

What is a community? Dictionaries define it as a unified body of individuals with a common interest. In the workplace, a community can come in all shapes and sizes, and is often the basic functional unit of productivity performance in an organization. A community can be as small as a two-person project team or as large as a company; it can be simple or complex, with members meeting frequently or annually; it can bring people together online or face-to-face; and it can be short-term or designed around a mission that might last for years.

Throughout this document we use the term “community,” but here we want to reinforce how it can go beyond a powerful concept and become a critical part of managing and integrating a multi-generational workforce. In a learning environment, communities, whether formally arranged or informally assembled, take collective responsibility for the learning of all members; they provide a structure where employees can assist one another as they master, or apprentice, a process, accomplish the work at hand, or reflect on successes or shortcomings. In other words, you can think of learning communities as a way to cultivate the experience that people have every day in the workplace.

While communities are still evolving in the workplace setting, their impact is already being felt. Our research shows that community environments offer a particularly effective way to learn, and illustrate the concept “learning is the work.” Based on our client experience, learning communities often become frameworks through which organizations can capture, cultivate, and build on the broader, collective experience. When people come together for a common purpose, they bring their experience and know-how with them; community structures provide the space where people can readily share their knowledge in a more immediate, interactive, and global way.

Compelling evidence for the importance of social interaction to learning comes from the landmark study of college and university students’ experience by Richard J. Light, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups.ⁱ In the corporate world, learning communities serve as these small study groups, allowing members to share experience, information, and knowledge across geographic and organizational boundaries. These types of communities are increasingly being used to generate knowledge and strengthen employee skills.ⁱⁱ

Participants in an effective learning community also tend to be committed to their group and that commitment drives their desire to work hard and help others, our findings indicate. A well-functioning learning community, for example, gives members an opportunity to achieve their personal learning goals while meeting the organization’s requirements. In this way, communities could be a particularly good fit for millennials who thrive in smaller, local group settings but frequently resist larger corporate organizational constructs.

Likewise, cognitive anthropologists Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave propose that more effective learning takes place when learners are engaged in what they refer to as a “community of practice.” Their definition of community of practice sounds very similar to the learning community that we just described: a group of collaborators, learning from each other and developing themselves personally in the process. As a community, they develop a shared repertoire of resources, experiences, stories, tools, and problem-solving techniques. With sustained interaction over time, they negotiate and institutionalize knowledge and meaning for their community—as well as the larger organization.

Our research and client interviews were clear: Communities are powerful knowledge networks. Whether you call them learning communities or communities of practice, forming them is a winning strategy to discover, aggregate, and share knowledge within your organization.

If learning communities are so powerful, why don’t we form them all the time? In part, it is because it is not trivial to create a well-run and productive community. Challenges include: organizational barriers that prevent the appropriate community members from finding and connecting with each other; variable capacity among people for active membership in a regularly meeting community (or communities!); an ineffective mix of competencies among the membership, and a lack of organizational support. Here, we’ll look at a few strategies to address these difficulties:

• Cultivate experience, cultivate communities
• Spark and support communities
• Recognize limitations
• Use media tools to support communities

Cultivate Experience, Cultivate Communities
Learning and Development plays a crucial role in the formation, support, and stewardship of workplace learning communities. L&D provides the care and nurturing that moves a community from being a loose collection of people talking with each other to a well-oiled machine focused on performance improvements and stronger team relationships.

With the right support, L&D can transform a “work group” into a learning community with specific benefits to both the individual and the organization. For example, as the individual cultivates personal experience, expands his or her skills, and enjoys the team-centric connection, the organization benefits as the L&D group collects, archives, and shares learning results with the broader workplace. In effect, L&D sustains the community’s process and performance data and brings it to the rest of the organization in an ongoing knowledge- and expertise-swapping environment.

Spark and Support Communities
Community and organizational leaders play a critical role in the success of a learning community, from the early forming stages right through to its conclusion. In the beginning stages, leaders will want to recruit and incentivize the community’s membership, while establishing and communicating clear goals, expectations, and rewards. As the community gains traction, community leaders will be responsible for inspiring creativity, exploring new directions, holding the group accountable, and establishing milestones for evaluation and reflection. In the final phases of the community exchange, leaders will assist with an outcomes assessment, promote and share the community’s work with others in the organization, and leverage the organizational culture change resulting from the effort.

As motivation, leaders often reward communities with the best performance. However, this practice can unfortunately backfire and encourage community members to hoard ideas and innovations rather than share them with a “competing” team. Leaders and L&D can best support their communities by offering incentives for absolute, as opposed to relative, performance, which helps ensure that the community’s efforts are not in opposition to the overall organization’s information-sharing goals. It is only when a community is a contributing part of the larger, overall effort that the individual and the organization benefit.

Recognize Limitations
Leaders should recognize that workers may well be members of multiple communities, each with intense (and sometimes conflicting) demands. Community leaders should also note that not everyone has the same capacity or competency for this sort of group work and adjustments should be made accordingly.

If a community is formed by way of a formal learning event (a training program or a retreat), it is important to acknowledge the farther the community’s work extends beyond the formal event, the harder it is to sustain. Steps must be taken to continue to motivate such a learning community while managing anticipated constraints.

Learning communities are not the solution for every workplace learning challenge, and some learning situations will need a different approach. For instance, sometimes didactic presentations are the best tool for the job, or, perhaps, a hybrid approach—where some of the learning is accomplished in classrooms, some in communities, some with web-delivered content, and some in isolation—will be effective. It is important to pick the right tool for the job and make a clear and explicit connection between the learning and the work.

Use Media Tools to Support Communities
A wide range of online tools can support community development and expansion. Social networking sites, blogs, wikis, communication mechanisms (that is, newsfeeds, alerts, forums, chat), and analytics can all facilitate the community’s work and assist with data mining, aggregation, and archiving. But how do you decide which tools to use? Our experience shows that it’s less about the tool than what the tool can do for you. The first step is to identify what you want individuals and the organization to gain from your learning communities. Then look at your current tools and identify gaps—what they cannot currently do for you that you need done. From there, focus on filling the requirement gaps. When suggesting options, emphasis should be placed on the affordances of the tools (what they can do better than some other tool) rather than the specific tool itself.

A customer service manager noticed that one of her representatives was a serious Twitter devotee, using it to keep in touch with family and friends. Looking for new ways to improve her company’s customer service outreach, she suggested that he experiment with a Twitter ID for the company. Together, they formed a four-person community with two other interested reps. They set up a Twitter account and the Twitter devotee taught everyone how to use the tool. Within several months, the group gained a following as they groomed an active list of customers that they followed. Input gathered via the micro-blogging service was relayed to product development teams and used to shape new customer service policies in the department.

One of the largest Internet portal providers promotes community-based action learning (learning-by-doing) by using a hybrid in-person/online model, offering two workshops, and creating two different-sized working groups.

The first workshop establishes the larger community’s goals, conveys the principles of action learning, and sets up smaller peer-to-peer learning communities. These smaller communities, comprised of just two people, use the remainder of the first workshop to work together and think about partnering concepts and related advisory and reflection activities. Then, in-between workshops, the two-person communities practice self-directed action learning exercises individually and check-in with each other online for additional practice, feedback, and support with their community partner. The larger community conducts an online re-connect session midway before a second, final in-person workshop. At the second workshop, the action learning concepts are exhibited, discussed, and reinforced. The hybrid use of different learning and support practices makes the most of community initiatives at various levels.

In search of a way to groom future leaders at a major publishing company, senior management formed a community of middle managers to meet monthly with the president. Over time, the pro-forma meetings turned into working sessions where business problems could be debated, discussed, and vetted. After a year of regular meetings, the managers’ group was charged with leading up a corporate organizational change effort. What started as a hood ornament group, turned into a mission-critical learning community for the company.