The Practice of Learning Teams

Learning Teams are part of a way of looking at safety, quality and operational excellence differently by a facilitated approach to worker engagement and supporting the empowerment of people to own safety, quality or operational excellence. A Learning Team is notable because it encourages organizations to obtain and consider different perspectives and angles of functional diversity to define a problem in a group context.

The different perspectives that emerge from a Learning Team group demonstrate that no one person holds all the knowledge needed to solve complex problems. A Learning Team involves facilitated engagement (using a facilitator) with workers to understand and then learn from the opportunities that are presented by:
1) Everyday successful and safe work (Everyday Learning Teams)
2) Events or incidents that could have or did harm workers (Event Learning Teams)
3) Introduction of changes (Management of change) that could affect worker safety (Periodic Learning Teams).

Learning Teams support both worker learning and organizational learning by allowing the different stakeholders groups to understand better what, when, how, and why, people do things differently rather than following formal, written procedures or systems. By understanding what is necessary to make sure things go right, it is possible to focus on ensuring that factors which make things go right are present in the workplace every day.