Employee-led learning: Principles and practice

Introduction

Organizations that embrace a culture of learning create an environment that encourages curiosity and knowledge sharing, which in turn leads to better business outcomes. A strong learning culture can better position your organization for future skill shifts and primes employees to think and act more like owners when it comes to their own development needs. One effective way to promote a learning culture is through an employee-to-employee learning program. Employees develop and grow by teaching others, and the people in your organization learn from peers with first-hand knowledge of the business.

At Google, many trainings are run through an employee-to-employee network called “g2g” (Googler-to-Googler). This volunteer teaching network of Google employees dedicate a portion of their time to helping their peers learn and grow. Volunteers — known internally as “g2g'ers” — can participate in a variety of ways, such as teaching courses, providing 1:1 coaching, and designing learning materials, and they come from every part of Google. Where needed, Google still uses outside professional trainers to help with highly specialized topics or targeted sessions for executives.

Many of the most popular classes led by g2g’ers focus on general professional skills, like negotiations and leadership, and role-related skills, like sales training and Python coding. It’s also helped upskill huge numbers of employees around new opportunities.

An employee-to-employee learning program is not about “doing more with less.” If you’re looking to save money on a training budget and mandating participation, you could end up with resentful employee teachers delivering rushed classes to confused employee learners. Before proceeding, consider potential pitfalls. One thing that has made the g2g program so successful at Google is that the employees participate voluntarily and are supported by a culture that values learning.

Define your goals

What are your goals for learning in your organization? What do you hope to achieve by launching an employee-to-employee learning program? These are important questions to ask at the start. The goal at Google is to provide the right learning to the right people at the right time. For g2g, this means focusing efforts on providing high quality learning experiences at scale through community-driven initiatives.

This goal is anchored on three core beliefs:

1. All employees have the right to learn, regardless of location, role, tenure or level in the organization.
2. Learning is the responsibility of the entire company, not just the Learning & Development team.
3. Trust that employees are smart, capable and motivated — they have the capacity to grow Google’s learning culture.

Make sure your org size can support an employee-to-employee program. While empowering employees to teach and learn from each other can offer tremendous benefits, it may also be impractical given the size of your organization. There is a cost to selecting, supporting, and training employee facilitators. Take time to do an analysis to determine your setup and operating costs and compare that to what it would cost to provide the same training via other means (e.g., vendors or hiring full time training staff).

Make sure the content can be appropriately delivered by a peer. If you’re trying to teach highly specialized content, content aimed at your most senior leaders, or content that could be very sensitive, consider having a professional deliver it. You don’t want to set up an employee facilitator to fail by giving them an impossible task.

Remember that not all learning happens in a classroom with a single teacher in front of multiple students. So even if a full employee-to-employee learning program doesn’t make sense for your organization, consider the many other ways your employees can help one another learn. One-on-one mentoring programs can be incredibly powerful, or having employees hold open office hours can be an easy way for expertise to be shared.

Integrate learning into culture

In order for an employee-to-employee learning program to work, it needs to be part of a wider organizational culture that values continuous learning. No matter your industry, it’s likely that your employees, your organization, and, ultimately, your bottom line would benefit from a culture where employees are constantly learning new things, seeking out new opportunities, and developing new skills.

The success of the g2g program at Google is due largely to the culture of learning fostered within the company. We also work to reward and spotlight g2gers to help cultivate their volunteer participation. The g2g program is aligned with Google’s core learning philosophies:

• Learning is a process, not an event, that requires motivation, opportunities to practice, and continuous feedback.
• Learning happens in real life, especially during transitions or challenging moments.
• Learning is personal. Everyone has different learning styles and different levels of challenge within which they can work.
• Learning is social. Google supports an environment for Googlers to connect with peers for advice and support.

Here are a few things Google has done to help make peer-to-peer learning a part of the culture:

• Strong leadership sponsorship: Like so many large-scale efforts, getting support from the top is critical. Employees need to hear (and hopefully see) that leaders believe that learning is an important part of work. At Google, one senior leader said: “It’s very unlikely that you’ll ever learn faster, or better than you will from one of your fellow employees.”
• Connection to core values: It can be easy to pay lip service to employee development, but it’s difficult to fake if your core values include how you treat employees. If your organization is serious about fostering a learning culture, tie it into your organizational mission or core values. By then supporting an employee-to-employee learning program, you’re sharing responsibility and ownership for a learning culture with your employees and everyone can see how it connects to your organization’s reason for being.
• Start early: Making it clear and explicit from day one that learning is expected and part of everyone’s job is an important opportunity. Consider how you can incorporate it directly into new hire orientation or encourage managers to bring it up with new team members. At Google, the new-hire (“Noogler”) orientation program itself features multiple g2g facilitators talking about a variety of topics.

The g2g team is often asked: “How do you motivate people to do something outside their core job?” The answer is actually pretty simple; trust people to do great work, give them tools and feedback, show them how it connects to the big picture, and then step aside.

Recruit facilitators

Selecting the right people to teach the content makes a huge difference to the success of an employee-to-employee learning program. By investing up front in finding folks who are passionate about helping their peers grow, you’ll save time and resources later on by not having to struggle with volunteer accountability or motivation.

Here are a few tips on recruiting:

• Make sure they’re interested: Having leaders nominate the best subject matter experts for the topic sounds like a good idea, but often it doesn’t work. A passion for teaching and sharing expertise is critical to a volunteer’s success. The Google team has found that g2g’ers who have been nominated to teach, but don’t have a passion for teaching, tend to have lower quality scores than those who self-select into the program. Assessing a candidate’s level of interest, not just their level of competency, has to be part of the process.
• But, interest alone isn’t enough: Interest is critical when selecting volunteers, but you don’t want to just accept everyone who’s interested. It needs to be a balance between finding folks who are passionate about teaching as well as experts in the content.
• Take the time to interview: Sit down with potential teachers to get to know them and assess their fit for the program.Recruiting the right people for the right content is a critical step in building a successful peer-to-peer learning program, even if they’ve been nominated to participate by leadership.

Develop facilitator skills

Development is critical to both the quality of your program and to the motivation of your participants. When people volunteer for something, they usually want to do a good job. By providing them with the resources and support they need to improve their own skills, you’ll not only increase the quality of the trainings they teach, but your facilitators will view this support as a reward itself.

Recognize and reward

Think about meaningful recognition options for your facilitators. This can be a message to their manager explaining their great work, a certificate they can print, or physical rewards.

You may want to send your facilitators recognition if they've:

• Taken on a new challenge, such as facilitating a customized session.
• Been an active member of the facilitator community, encouraging participation from others.
• Volunteered to upskill a new facilitator, or provided qualitative feedback to an existing facilitator.

You may also want to reward facilitators when they've met a milestone in their facilitator career, such as delivering their 5th session, their 10 session, reaching a 100% satisfied feedback score from participants, etc. Consider not publicizing when these milestones are to avoid creating a culture where participants are motivated if they’ll be recognized with physical rewards.

To keep facilitators engaged on an ongoing basis, consider creating a network and connecting all of your facilitators for key programs. Building a supportive, well-connected community with your facilitators will be well worth the effort in the long term. Program managers who have cultivated strong communities can rely more heavily on their facilitators to help them out with onboarding new facilitators, updating content, and handling custom requests. This can be done with a simple email list, chat group, or you can hold regular meetings to convene facilitators. Encourage your facilitators to discuss best practices, content changes, new projects, and more.

Avoid pitfalls

There were plenty of growing pains for the g2g team as they started and scaled the program at Google. But so long as lessons were learned and shared, the team continued to improve the program.

Remove barriers to entry. When g2g first started, in the name of quality, there were tons of hoops that volunteers needed to jump through in order to participate. The process could take up to a year to complete, which is too long for any organization. The g2g program’s growth wasn’t keeping up with Google’s expanding needs, so the team decided to run an uncontrolled “experiment.” All general prerequisites to participate in g2g were removed, and instead instituted program-specific requirements. After this change, facilitator participation doubled in just six months, and quality remained high. In the years since, the program has removed even more barriers and given volunteers more support resources to bring in more facilitators and help them build their skills, and our quality has continued to rise over time. Trust people to do great work and create a quality assurance process that assumes people will do well, rather than assuming they will fail.

Secure leadership support, not just permission. When g2g first started, the team focused on making sure volunteers had permission from their managers to participate, rather than active support to make their participation successful. This was a major mistake. Permission and support are two very different things, and it’s taken years to shift the organization to a culture of support for volunteer programs like this. We started providing more data to managers and leaders, showing the individual and organizational value of having employees teach. Now, instead of just allowing their reports to participate as long as it “doesn’t interfere with their core job,” Google managers are encouraging participation and making space in employees’ workloads for activities that benefit the larger organization. Take the time to embed these concepts into manager training and expectations before scaling too far.