How can your staff learn from each other?

By pairing experienced staff members with newcomers, you create a platform for sharing knowledge, best practices, and insights. Mentors can offer guidance on navigating the organization's culture, processes, and expectations, helping mentees acclimate faster to their roles. Firstly, it accelerates the learning curve for new employees, reducing the time it takes for them to become fully productive. Secondly, mentors often gain a sense of fulfillment and increased job satisfaction by contributing to the success of their mentees. Thirdly, the program fosters a sense of camaraderie and support within the organization, leading to a more cohesive and collaborative work environment.

An example that comes to mind immediately is when we sent new mentees and their mentors to the field to train assessors, enumerators to collect data from classrooms. Knowledge sharing was the first thing they experienced and you can share knowledge without bringing to fore best practices and insights. By collaborating to do presentations, they quickly acclimatized accelerating the learning curve. Some Mentees , had the opportunity to put into practice the soft skills they have learnt over time. All these were possible due to the availability of resources and the feedback support system the organization put in place.

I would say you MUST (not can) "set clear objectives, expectations and feedback mechanisms" when doing a job shadow experience. Without guidance and understanding of the goals, the employee is just sitting with someone else while they do their job. The employee needs to know what to look for, what to think about, and how to process their experience so they can apply it back to their own work or growth.

I am concerned that we do not set our employees up to succeed if we skip teaching or orienting them on how to do what we ask them to do. Feedback mechanism, for example, how does one respond to feedback...have we taught them that yet? Seriously, how do they know? Do they know? What do they know?

Another idea that might be helpful is to assign a mentor who is one level higher to each team member. This way, they can learn and mentor at the same time, which can improve their knowledge and skills. Mentoring can also be a rewarding and enjoyable experience for both parties. In my team, everyone has a mentee and they love it.

Daily huddles at the start of the day I really useful for knowledge sharing. All it entails is a quick five or 10 minutes of any learning from the previous day. What I would recommend, however is that you train your staff on how to deliver a message very quickly, but at the same time get the learning across.

I have found helpful the knowledge sharing sessions. I have noticed when staff discuss topics or issues that relates to improving instruction, each staff member brings valued points from their own perspectives and their own experiences as educators. In knowledge shared sessions, staff learn to understand topics or issues from different lenses and gain knowledgeable information from the expert.