Hybrid work has made informal learning less visible, not less vital. Elyas Coutts explores how proximity once helped new starters absorb tacit knowledge, culture and judgement through everyday interactions. Now, purposeful messaging can crowd out spontaneous moments, leaving junior and mid-level employees with fewer chances to learn and build trust.
Historically, most of what employees learnt didn’t just come from the onboarding process or training programmes; it also came from the proximity of being in the office surrounded by senior colleagues. Proximity gave new starters and junior employees the chance to watch how difficult conversations were navigated, to overhear and join in spontaneous discussions and absorb the office jargon organically.
Some studies suggest informal learning accounts for approximately 75% of workplace learning. The challenge is that informal learning doesn’t look like more formal teaching interventions, since it is ambient, incidental and often invisible. Informal learning has a massive impact and helps new starters develop their skillets and knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is the foundation of informal learning and builds the social culture of many workplaces
Tacit knowledge, also known as implicit knowledge, refers to the skills, insights and experiences that senior employees possess, but this knowledge is not always easily expressed in formal documentation. New starters became dependent on tacit knowledge to close the gap between technical capabilities and genuine effectiveness. In many ways, tacit knowledge is the foundation of informal learning and builds the social culture of many workplaces, filling the gaps that functional training couldn’t.
How modern work patterns reduce in-person interactions
Modern work patterns often consist of hybrid working, which results in employees having a more isolated mindset, so the workplace is no longer a space that fosters collaboration. Walking through the office and seeing people with their headphones in and heads down is a common occurrence. In the modern workplace, there isn’t a problem with communication, there is a problem with spontaneous conversations and in-person interactions. This isn’t a criticism of how people work; it’s an observation about how the system rewards employees. An employee’s responsiveness is valued, so inboxes get constant attention, focus is protected and interruptions feel unwelcome.
It is now becoming common for hybrid schedules to not align with colleagues whose working styles might have previously been naturally absorbed into one another. The main thing that has changed is the intentionality of workplace interactions; people often only connect when there’s a reason to, and that is usually using a platform such as Teams or Slack. This approach is efficient, but it also removes all those impromptu moments for learning that may not have necessarily had a reason before, but carried a lot of value, especially for new starters. With modern working patterns, relationships form along a task line rather than organically at a water cooler or at the commercial coffee machine during the afternoon coffee breaks.
The impact on people and culture
The impact of weakened informal learning impacts new and junior employees who are still finding their footings. Experienced employees who have already internalised a great deal, gathered institutional knowledge and built existing relationships, aren’t as impacted by modern working patterns. New starters and junior employees have not yet had the chance to build these skills.
New hires often need around 12 months to reach peak performance potential. The problem is that new starters are finding that there are fewer moments to observe how decisions get made, there are fewer chances to pick up on the unwritten rules around the office and to learn how disagreements are handled. There are fewer opportunities for new starters to try to build the kind of low-stakes familiarity with colleagues that, over time, becomes genuine trust and the solid foundation of many workplace relationships. The organisation may be warm, well-intentioned, and rich with documentation, but no onboarding deck replicates live environments, and no scheduled check-in produces the kind of understanding that comes from proximity.
The impact doesn’t stop with new starters; mid-level employees are also missing out too. When most interactions at work have a specific purpose behind them, you naturally spend less time with people outside your immediate circle. Collaboration doesn’t break down entirely when the opportunity for these interactions fades, it just becomes more formal and a little less human feeling, resulting in workplace culture becoming thinner.
Why organisations often miss this problem
Part of why this goes unnoticed is that organisations measure outputs such as response times and task completion but rarely track the informal exposure that underpins workplace productivity and development. The cross-team relationships, the density of incidental knowledge transfer and the unstructured moments where understanding forms become less of a focus point. Many organisations also believe they’ve addressed the knowledge-sharing problem by investing in better communication tools.
Slack, Teams, Notion, and shared documentation make the infrastructure look comprehensive, but having more channels to communicate through doesn’t automatically mean richer knowledge transfer. When interaction is intentional rather than incidental, those tools become pipelines for task updates rather than spaces where culture, context and tacit knowledge can be transferred. It turns out that more communication infrastructure doesn’t always mean better communication across the workplace.
Creating moments that matter
It’s likely that hybrid working is here to stay, so organisations need to be more deliberate with their approach and create environments where informal learning can still happen naturally. New starters and junior employees benefit from informal learning just as much as they do from formal training and processes. However, it isn’t just new starters and junior employees who benefit from a collaborative atmosphere. The entire workplace culture depends on it.
Elyas Coutts is the CEO at Connect Vending
