Learning
Learning
If the situation that demands attention is repetitive, people consider it so boring. Same time, if the situation is beyond challenging, people fall in to anxiety. It's a trap. The right amount of everything is what keep people going. It should have the right amount of balance in challenge so that it leads to learning. Is the environment right for learning?
In a psychological study conducted, people who spend right amount of time in learning and exploring new things emerged as top performers. While the people who does boring job, went ahead and indulged themselves in office gossips, binge watching TV and other activities that let them demotivated.
Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist analyzed kids and presented a word which is "flow" that applies to kids. I have modified the statement to fit an adult and here how it is.
"It is an internal state that signifies a person is engaged in a right task. You have find something you like and stick to it. It's when where they get bored in workplace and they act up and show false attitude, and when they're overwhelmed by a challenge that they get anxious about their work. But you learn at your best when you have something you care about and you can get pleasure from being engaged in."
It is about playing with the natural strength of a person's skills and trying to slowly help them overcome their weakness. Gardner also adds, "When people gain flow from the learning, they will be able to take up challenges in new areas". It is about helping people get better at what they do which Organizations are in dire need of. But they aren't doing anything about it.
Gallup's extensive research study states that in United States 50% of employees are not actively engaged at work and nearly other 20% are actively disengaged. The total cost of all this disengagement is about $300 billion a year in lost productivity which is larger than the GDP of Singapore, Portugal or Israel. According to McKinsey consulting, in some countries, the engagement is as little as 2 to 3 percent.
Human beings are social animals. We learn together, we learn from others and most of all we watch and learn. Organizations needs to have community of practice from which employees learn and share. It goes way back to school days. The weak student will always be paired with the brightest and there is a strong reason for this learning psychology. They watch and learn from one another. Pair programming, pair testing, having a discovery team etc. is all part of learning from one another. Organizations need to encourage such practices for their employees to learn and help them achieve their flow.
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