Employees Learn More in Informal Talking, Study Finds

A chance meeting in the hall. A quick visit with a co-worker. To a boss, it may look like goofing off. But workers know better: They often learn more chatting on the job than in any training session.

A study to be released today will let more bosses in on the secret. The two-year, $1.6-million project, funded partly by the Labor Department, shows that workers learn most of what they do on the fly, and often from one another.

“Companies haven’t paid any attention to this. It’s been an invisible part of people’s work,” said Betsy Brand, co-director of the study by the Newton, Mass.-based Center for Workforce Development and a former assistant secretary of education.

“We’re hoping that managers will begin to look at the learning that’s occurring and begin to see it for what it is,” she said Tuesday.

Most companies realize that in a service and information economy, intellectual capital is often their most important competitive asset. So to better educate workers, they pour money into formal training, spending up to $50 billion annually on such programs, according to the Labor Department.

But up to 70% of workplace learning is informal, research has found.

And the Center for Workforce Development study has taken one of the most comprehensive looks into when and where workers learn. The study involved observations by researchers at seven companies and responses from more than 1,000 of those companies’ employees.

At a Siemens factory in North Carolina, informal learning had been thriving right under managers’ noses.

They’d been shaking their heads and wondering how to stop workers from gathering so often in the company cafeteria. But the research scientists discovered the cafeteria was actually a hotbed of workplace learning, said Barry Blystone, director of training at the Siemens Power Transmission & Distribution plant in Wendell, N.C.

“The assumption was made that this was chitchat, talking about the golf game,” Blystone said in a telephone interview. “But there was a whole lot of work activity.”

After the study, Siemens officials began placing empty pads of paper and overhead projectors in the lunchroom to facilitate informal meetings. And they set out to educate managers about unofficial gatherings.

“We tell them, ‘Keep an open mind, allow it to go on and don’t get in the way,’ ” Blystone said.

At Visteon Automotive Systems in Lansdale, Pa., workers had been sent once or twice a year to formal training sessions that lasted from a day to a week.

As a result of the study, the company said, it will send teams of workers to training sessions together, rather than sending workers individually, so workers can help one another better use the new information once back on the job, said Larry Stewart, manager of human resources at the electronics maker, which is part of Ford Motor Co.

The study also found that significant informal learning occurs in meetings; interactions with customers, mentors and supervisors; site visits; cross-training; shift changes; peer-to-peer communication; and just by doing one’s job.

More than 70% of the 1,000 workers who participated in the study said that during a typical week, they share information with co-workers; 55% said they ask co-workers for advice.

The five other companies in the study were Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill.; Boeing Commercial Airplane Group of Seattle; Data Instruments of Acton, Mass.; Reflexite North America of New Britain, Conn.; and Merry Mechanization of Englewood, Fla.