Building a Stronger Team: Collaborative Learning Activities & Strategies
Table of Contents
The latest LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report shows that a lack of career development and learning opportunities are the top culprits behind employee turnover. To tackle this issue, employers are prioritizing Learning & Development in 2023.
Employee retention is not the only reason why employee training is important – although it’s definitely one to weigh in.
Corporate training helps employees become more efficient in their jobs and more creative, even. With a highly skilled workforce, your company remains competitive and your brand leads the way in your industry.
Let’s not forget that the modern workplace is constantly changing shapes and colors, from the integration of technology – now enhanced by AI as well – to the shift toward flexible work hours and remote work.
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So apart from the technical skills of the future, employees additionally need to cultivate resilience and become more adaptive and confident to handle every change, good or bad, that comes their way.
To maximize training effectiveness, many companies add collaborative learning activities to their training courses. The main “selling point” of collaborative activities is that they’re highly interactive and don’t feel forced.
Employees engage in insightful conversations and leverage each other’s skills and knowledge as they complete an assignment together, building a stronger bond along the way.
Typical examples include online discussions and team group projects, often paired with a reward system to make things more interesting.
In this post, we’re discussing collaborative learning and the reasons why a Learning Management System (LMS) is the most suitable tool for the job.
Read on to learn more about collaborative learning benefits and best practices, top collaborative activities for business training, and which LMS features facilitate employee interaction and collaboration.
Benefits of Collaborative Learning in Employee Training
Incorporating collaborative activities into your corporate training program pays dividends. And because these activities cultivate soft skills regardless of the main training topic, the benefits are evident in your workplace too.
Let’s see what you can achieve by adding a few collaborative activities to your course curriculum:
Increase employee engagement
We all know from personal experience that passive learning not only barely works, but is also incredibly boring! Collaborative learning, on the other hand, is active. It enables employees to interact with each other and participate hands-on in the learning process.
As a result, employees feel more engaged in training overall and find the motivation to complete their training more happily.
Improve knowledge retention
Another major benefit of collaborative learning is enhanced knowledge retention. Whether they participate in real-time discussions, do research, or work on a practical assignment, employees are actively involved and therefore assimilate information better.
For example, during discussions and brainstorming sessions, participants don’t just consume information readily given to them. They need to process, evaluate, and analyze information and facts and eventually generate their own ideas.
Knowledge retention is even higher in hands-on activities and projects where employees must do investigative work.
With these activities, they learn by doing and practicing, so new information sticks much easier.
Prepare employees for work situations
Collaborative exercises are the best way to prepare employees for real-world work situations by exploring different scenarios and simulating dialogues.
This is particularly beneficial for anyone doing a people-oriented job, like customer support, sales, medical professionals, HR, and employees in managerial or supervising positions.
Employees in these and similar job roles need to enhance their communication and “people” skills, with some of them also having to deal with delicate situations and charged emotions.
Boost problem-solving and critical thinking
Collaborative activities help employees improve their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
During fruitful discussions, brainstorming sessions, role-playing exercises, and simulations, employees learn to think fast, weigh in different factors, and consider several alternatives before they come up with the best possible course of action.
Foster teamwork and communication
Perhaps the most obvious and self-explanatory benefit of collaborative learning is better teamwork and communication.
When employees work together on a collaborative project, they learn from each other better. They find ways to communicate and coordinate more effectively and develop a sense of camaraderie, all of which eventually show in how they collaborate on work projects as well.
Top Collaborative Learning Activities for Employee Training
Surely the benefits we’ve discussed have got you thinking that interactive learning is worth a try.
So let us give you some more concrete examples of how you can integrate collaborative learning into your corporate training strategy.
1. Team-based projects
Team-based projects are assignments that employees must complete together as a team, often competing against another team to compare who achieved the best results.
💁 Why: Encouraging employees to work together on projects and assignments improves collaboration and communication skills, builds stronger bonds among team members, and builds delegation skills.
🤝 Examples: Some fantastic team-based activities are case study analysis, product ideation & brainstorming, or cross-departmental problem-solving projects.
💡 Tips
2. Group discussions and brainstorming sessions
Group discussions take place either under a course discussion forum, during a live session, or on a third platform like a social media group.
Brainstorming sessions are conducted in a similar way. That said, there are some differences between the two activities.
Group discussions are more structured and are often moderated by an instructor (especially during live classes). They take place simply to exchange points of view and give food for thought.
On the other hand, brainstorming sessions are free-flowing and have a specific goal, usually to generate a new idea or come up with a solution.
💁 Why: Structured discussions encourage active participation and stimulate critical thinking skills while keeping learners engaged during the lesson. Brainstorming sessions are essential to give our creative minds a little nudge!
💭 Examples: Course discussions and brainstorming sessions can be about anything, depending on the training topic. Initiative a discussion about the importance of diversity and inclusion, explore different leadership styles or share strategies for handling difficult customers. Brainstorm new product features, marketing strategies for LinkedIn, etc. You get the idea!
💡 Tips
3. Coaching & mentoring programs
Coaching & mentoring are two similar forms of peer learning.
In mentorship programs, you pair newcomers with experienced employees who share their experience and guide the new employee through their onboarding. Mentors can help them acclimate and offer advice about future career opportunities within the company.
Coaching focuses more on helping the employee uncover their potential and true inclinations. It typically lasts shorter than mentoring and is more formal since the coach is usually a qualified professional outside the company.
💁 Why: Both coaching and mentoring are excellent ways to support your employees emotionally and professionally. They have a tremendous positive impact on employee satisfaction and retention and can change the way employees progress in their careers.
👨💼 Examples: Mentorship is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to coaching, there are several types you can offer company-wide, such as leadership, change management, creativity, and work-life balance coaching. You can also offer job-specific coaching, like sales or customer service coaching.
💡 Tips: Provide platforms or tools to facilitate knowledge exchange, like:
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Problem-solving activities present learners with a challenging topic they have to work around and find a solution.
💁 Why: Problem-solving is an excellent way to boost creativity and critical thinking and appreciate how each person perceives a situation differently.
🧩 Examples: Some cool problem-solving activities are hypothetical case studies, a root-case analysis problem, Kaizen events, and the cause-and-effect (or fishbone) diagram.
💡 Tips: Encourage employees to use common problem-solving techniques, like mind mapping, the 5 whys, and SWOT analysis.
5. Team-building activities
All collaborative activities are, by definition, team-building activities since participants engage with one another in some way.
Team-building activities, though, have more fun elements than typical collaborative activities and resemble games rather than assignments.
💁 Why: As the name suggests, team-building activities focus on team bonding first and foremost, and we don’t even have to explain why it’s essential to have strong teams. (But if we do, a positive workplace with less friction and improved productivity is why.) Like a breath of fresh air, team-building activities are an essential addition, especially to mandatory or demanding training programs.
🙌 Examples: Scavenger hunts, trivia games, and reflection meetings where employees share their experiences and outcomes from the training course can bring your teams together in a fun and effortless way.
💡 Tips: Make team-bonding activities special and memorable by following up with a night out or a virtual cocktail hour.
6. Role-playing exercises
Role-playing exercises require that two or more learners engage in a dialogue that simulates a real-world situation.
The scope of these exercises is to help learners think on their feet and react in the most suitable manner.
Role-playing exercises can be about anything, but mostly they help demonstrate soft skills like communication, conflict management, empathy, objection handling (for sales), or diversity & inclusion.
Of course, you can use role-playing for more technical skills, like product knowledge, cybersecurity training, or compliance.
💁 Why: Role-playing exercises are an excellent opportunity for practice without the risk of saying or doing the wrong thing. They can help training managers verify that learners have reached the learning objectives of the course and demonstrate the required skills.
🎭 Examples: Depending on the training topic, you can ask employees to enact a dialogue between a nurse and a patient who refuses to take their medication, a skeptical prospect who won’t sign up for a subscription, or a manager and a colleague who is repeatedly late.
💡 Tips: Reverse the roles to help learners dig deeper into the mentality, emotional state, and reasoning of their interlocutor.
7. Simulations
Similar to, but more immersive than, role-playing exercises, simulations emerge the learners in a real-world situation that requires them to apply their strategic thinking and complex problem-solving.
Simulations usually replicate complex, pressuring, or high-risk situations.
💁 Why: Simulations are incredibly engaging and valuable learning experiences. The learner acts in real time, with minimal time to process or plan. For this reason, simulations are also reliable learner assessment activities.
📽️ Examples: Create simulations to see how employees manage crisis: conduct an emergency evacuation, orchestrate a social engineering attack, or stage a bribe to an executive.
💡 Tips: Simulations should always be realistic and relevant to the participants’ job roles and the program’s learning objectives. Depending on the scope, the simulation may need to take place in a physical space, using video conferencing tools, through email or phone, or even with the assistance of AR/VR equipment.
8. Gamification
In the context of education, gamification is not a learning activity but an instructional design approach. It’s essentially a reward system: as learners progress through the course, and for every activity they complete, they either earn something (e.g., a badge) or achieve something (e.g., unlock a new level).
💁 Why: Applying gamification techniques to your collaborative activities and your entire training program can significantly increase motivation and help learners maintain a high level of engagement. Gamification enhances the sense of achievement, helps learners visualize their progress, and ignites the desire to keep aiming higher.
🏆 Let’s see some common gamification techniques:
💡 Tips:
Leveraging an LMS for Collaborative Learning
Incorporating collaborative learning into your training courses is not hard, but you need some assistance from tech tools that will allow employees to communicate and work together seamlessly.
To keep things simple, you want to use just one tool that has it all – and that tool is an LMS. It’s time to see how an LMS supports collaborative activities:
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Learning Management Systems integrate with video conferencing tools that allow your teams to meet virtually and collaborate on their joined projects or participate in brainstorming sessions and workshops.
👉 LearnWorlds integrates with Zoom and Webex. And with its Calendly integration, you can enable your employees to book their spot for your live training events.
Collaboration features
Another huge benefit of an LMS is the access to discussion forums and groups to facilitate informal learning and the sharing of user-generated content.
👉 LearnWorlds offers a built-in community with course discussions, learner groups, and activity feeds so that employees can interact and share knowledge among themselves and with their mentor or coach.
Centralized file storage
LMSs support diverse types of content, which will come in handy for any collaborative activity that directly promotes knowledge exchange, like mentoring.
Many of them also offer unlimited file storage in one centralized location, which is perfect for streamlining and scaling your L&D initiatives.
👉 LearnWorlds offers unlimited users, courses, and file storage. The platform supports the following types of content:
Assessment builder
An assessment builder lets you easily create and distribute assignments to your teams.
👉 LearnWorlds has an advanced assessment builder that enables you to create diverse types of assessments that you can send as text, video, or audio files depending on how complex the assignment is and your preferred method of communication.
Similarly, you can accept text, video, and audio submissions from your learners – whatever fits best the scope of the project.
Reward system
Not all Learning Management Systems are flexible, however, the ones that are -like LearnWorlds- enable you to set up your course as a challenge or quest with levels, reward learners with badges, and create leaderboards.
You can additionally offer a certificate at the end of the course, which has great practical value as it verifies the employee’s newly acquired skills.
👉 LearnWorlds enables you to create badges to reward your learners throughout their learning journey. You can also drip-feed your course and set prerequisites to control how learners advance through the course.
For example, you can structure your online course as a challenge or split it into levels by adding a quiz or assignment at the end of each lesson. To move on to the next level and unlock the next challenge, learners must pass this quiz.
Our platform also enables you to build certificates of knowledge and certificates of completion. Both types are customizable, shareable, and can be edited to include unique identification numbers.
5 Best Practices for Incorporating Collaborative Activities Into Corporate Training
Last stop in our collaborative activities exploration: best practices. If you’re serious about taking collaboration up a notch, the following 5 best practices will help you do this right.
Set clear learning objectives
Before creating your online training program, you create clear and measurable learning objectives. Use these learning objectives as a benchmark before building any type of learning activity.
Ask yourself:
If a learning activity isn’t relevant to the learning objectives of the course or effective, it’s best to leave it out to avoid overwhelming employees.
Establish a supportive learning culture
Encourage lifelong learning in your organization by actively supporting employees.
For example, offer days off or allocate specific hours during the week that employees can use for their education.
Provide adequate resources and tools
Use the best tools available to facilitate collaborative learning. Employees should be able to seamlessly connect with one another and work together on the same project at the same time, even remotely. They also need to have quick access to a rich knowledge base.
An LMS is the most comprehensive solution as it combines the features of video conferencing and collaboration tools, plus useful features like reporting and support for different learning delivery methods.
Assess the effectiveness of collaborative activities
Just like you send out surveys to gauge customer satisfaction, you should find ways to receive employee feedback about your online training, including collaborative activities.
The most common ways to get employee feedback are interviews, surveys and questionnaires, and reports generated by your training platform.
👉 LearnWorlds offers robust analytics & insights with customizable reports, some of which can be scheduled for delivery at specific intervals. The platform’s Report Center generates not only “vanity metrics,” like completion rates, but also analyzes learner behavior and interaction with the content, like time spent on each activity, average scores, and more.
With LearnWorlds‘ Form Builder, you can additionally launch efficient surveys to get direct employee feedback.
Reevaluate and improve
Last but not least, it’s important that you always keep an eye on and update your training course from time to time.
Stay on top of instructional design and eLearning trends, as well as developments in your own industry, which may require you to update your training.
Discover the Power of Collaborative Learning
People are not lone wolfs, so they shouldn’t learn like ones. Collaborative activities are incredibly valuable experiences – and not just in terms of educational effectiveness. Sure, they’re engaging and immersive and allow for hands-on practice. These are amazing learning boosters.
But most importantly, collaborative activities bring your employees together and remind them of how joint work can complement each other’s strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.
If you haven’t tried collaborative activities for employee training, you’re missing out on a rare opportunity to build strong bonds among your employees while upskilling them. And if you haven’t tried LearnWorlds, you’re missing out on a great LMS that will transform your training initiatives.
LearnWorlds offers a 30-day free trial. Sign up now to discover all the ways we can help you turn corporate courses into a collaborative educational event that will change how employees feel about training.
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Androniki Koumadoraki
Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.
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