RECRUITMENT

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Why encourage informal learning?
Research realigns the role of
performance appraisals
FEEDBACK
MOST employees, from any profession
or sector, will spend time talking
about their job with friends, family
and colleagues.
In most cases, if they are in the same job
area with any consistency, they will pick up
and read articles and books that relate to
their profession, either casually in an ad-hoc
way, or even in a more structured approach,
with some self-improvement goals in mind.
All this is called informal learning, and
while it clearly has the potential to have a
positive impact on a person’s performance
in the workplace and their long-term career
development, its formal role has never been
fully acknowledged and has certainly never
been rigorously measured or quantified.
Traditionally, the development of
employee knowledge has been considered
a top-down practice, where senior leaders
determine the learning needs of employees
and create and deliver structured development
programs.
This is despite the acknowledgement that
employees choosing to engage in informal
learning tend to have high levels of confidence
in their own ability and competence.
“It has had a little bit of a negative definition,
for no good reason really, but informal
learning is everywhere and in so many things
we do,” says Karin Sanders, a professor and
head of the school of management at UNSW
Business School.
“Even if you have a dinner, you are talking
with your friends and that can be a part of
informal learning. You hear something, you
share knowledge and you are keeping up to
date.
“Informal learning had a place in the
development part of HR, but also it was not
measured, and if you want to know more
about it, and its impacts, then you need to
measure it in a community of practice.”
Link to formal functions
Informal learning was the focus of a recent
research project by Sanders and former
UNSW Business School colleague Timothy
C. Bednall (now at Swinburne University
of Technology), in collaboration with Piety
Runhaar from Wageningen University, The
Netherlands.
Taking a sample of 238 employees from
54 work teams in six Dutch vocational education
training (VET) schools, the researchers
looked at informal learning with the goal of
understanding how it might receive more
formal recognition within an organisation’s
human resource management (HRM) practice,
and how the HR system could further
encourage employees.
More specifically, the study looked at the
effects of perceptions of performance appraisal
quality and HRM system strength on
three informal learning activities: reflection
on daily activities, knowledge sharing with
colleagues, and innovative behaviour.
“We also made a distinction between
keeping up to date, also known as the reflecting
on your own behaviour,” says Sanders.
“These things, you can do by yourself, but
other informal learning activities are more
done in a team situation. Knowledge sharing
– you can’t do that by yourself. And there is
an element of reciprocity, because you are
giving and taking feedback.”
The study collected two waves of survey
data from respondents a year apart. The
only selection criteria was that employees
had to work at one of the six schools, and
so the breakdown was between teachers
(84.9%), teaching assistants (8.8%), team coordinators
(2.1%), with the remaining 4.2%
classified as “others”.
Data was collected via self-filling software,
with response rates just over 50%. The
questionnaire measured informal learning
activities by the respondents in four areas:
reflection on daily activities, knowledge sharing
with colleagues, innovative behaviour
and also performance appraisal quality.
The idea behind the inclusion of performance
appraisal was to see if this link to the
formal HR function could be a practical way
of integrating informal learning in a positive
way into the HR system.
The results bore this out, revealing that
the quality of performance appraisal from
line managers had a positive association with
all three informal learning activities in the
second wave, and with reflection in the first
wave.
This article was first published in BusinessThink,
the online business analysis
journal of UNSW Business School.
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WESTERN SYDNEY BUSINESS ACCESS SEPTEMBER 2015
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