Organizational Learning, Agility and Social Technologies in Contemporary Workplaces

The contemporary workplaces face demanding challenges, such as expectations to be agile, competitive, efficient and adept to using employee knowledge. There are several required virtues in order to have a conductive workplace, for example, organizational learning and agility. The discussion forum aimed to bring out the inter-related roles of organizational learning, agility and social technologies in modern workplaces. The working methods in the discussion group consisted of brainstorming, learning café and mind mapping. Work organizations are examined as potential but contradictory learning spaces. Agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly respond to changes in demand. Organizational learning and agility are increasingly enabled by social technologies. The social technologies advances in the modern society are rigorously changing the contemporary workplaces. Social technologies include communication and interactive mechanisms embedded on the internet, such as, wikis and blogs. We suggest that organizational learning and agility might be increasingly enabled by social technologies. However, social technologies have a potential to enable and disable organizational learning. The usage of social technology and the level of agility are depending on the contextual factors like type of organization, field of profession and type of work. Different types of organizations and work have different needs for using social technologies as a driving force of organizational learning and agility.