Learning Teams – the new kids on the health and safety block!
You may have heard or read about learning teams. So, what are they? Learning teams is a facilitated means of engaging with workers to understand and then learn from the opportunities that are presented by everyday successful and safe work as well as learning from events or incidents. So basically learning when things have gone well or when things have gone wrong.
This includes understanding what, when, how and why people do things differently from the formal systems and procedures in order to get the job done. By understanding what's necessary to make sure things go right (operational safety), we can focus on ensuring these factors are present in the workplace every day. Worker engagement is crucial to gaining this understanding. In essence, Learning Teams are a worker-focused engagement approach to problem identification, and problem-solving issues, conditions, environments, opportunities, and threats in organizations to support continuous improvement of operational excellence.
There are five core principles of learning teams; these are:
- Understanding that Work as Imagined and Work as Done give context
- Groups outperform individuals in problem identification and problem solving
- Workers have the best knowledge and understanding of the problem. Everyone sees risks differently.
- The more effort put into understanding the problem, the better the solution outcomes
- Group problem identification, solving and reflection drives learning and improvement
Learning opportunities exist with
- Everyday successful and safe work
- Events
- Management of change
If you’d like to know more about learning teams, please do not hesitate to reach out.
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Date Posted: 16 June 2022