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By providing your employees with development opportunities and fostering a lifelong learning mindset, you can greatly enhance your business.
Learning is a never-ending process. Whether that’s real training you take to hone your skills at a professional level or a pottery workshop you take on the weekend, we’re always learning something new. No wonder there’s the concept of lifelong learning, which sees us as eternal students who are always able to push our knowledge belt up a notch. But what does that mean when we think of learning as a business strategy?
Harnessing the benefits of a learning culture
There are many benefits to fostering a culture of learning and providing development opportunities for employees. It primarily shows your commitment as a company to the development of your staff. It also indicates a long-term strategy. Employees will know that you think long-term and are committed to improving performance and growing as a company.
Glint’s Employee Wellbeing Report notes that “opportunities to learn and grow” were identified as the key driver of work culture in 2020. As I mentioned in a previous article, when you look at the top reasons why an employee decides to leave, company culture takes center stage. This means that learning is a great weapon in a battle that keeps many HR managers up at night: talent retention.
An enhanced corporate culture and positive employee perception are not the only two benefits that learning and development bring. There is also the commitment of the staff themselves. Seeing interesting learning opportunities will likely make employees more involved in developing their careers and position in the company. This process will also indicate possible career moves within the company as they will become more specialized and in turn able to perform better.
Training after the pandemic
Training Magazine’s 2021 Training Industry Report shows interesting numbers as you analyze companies’ perceptions of learning and development. Education spending in the US rose to $92.3 billion, an increase of about 12% from 2020 to 2021. This is another lesson from the pandemic.
It is also interesting to note that there was a significant boost in internal training staff during this period. The payroll for training personnel increased by 62% to $68.7 billion between 2020 and 2021. At the same time, spending on external products and services fell from $10.7 billion to $8.1 billion. Executives and top management may find it more important to strengthen the internal culture and expand learning and development teams when they decide to provide more training opportunities for their employees.
Building a learning culture
There are countless ways to build a learning culture in a company. However, six steps are absolutely essential.
1. Establish a company-wide learning mindset. Make learning a top priority by providing learning opportunities for everyone in your organization. Create training programs for onboarding, upskilling and retraining. If you can, set aside some work time so people can focus on learning important skills.
2. Set goals for your learning efforts. Define goals for your entire company and each program. That way you can measure how efficient your learning programs are and adjust if necessary.
3. Turn yourself (and other key team members) into learning champions. Participate in training programs to hone your skills and encourage others to do the same. That will show your team how serious you are about these programs and inspire them to follow your steps.
4. Give and receive constructive feedback. Another cornerstone of a successful learning strategy is providing constructive feedback to the people being trained. Highlighting their achievements and pointing out ways to overcome their weaknesses can keep everyone motivated. Of course, this works both ways: you also need to be open to feedback from your team members on how to improve your learning programs.
5. Reward constant learners. While the learning itself can be satisfying, consider motivating your employees to participate in your learning programs. You can offer career advancement, monetary compensation, project participation, and more. Don’t forget to include messages of support for people in learning programs.
6. Surround yourself with curious people. Finally, it is worth remembering that a learning culture is not born overnight. You have to cultivate it year after year. That’s why you have to surround yourself with people who support that learning vision: they will help you build that learning culture.
Quantify Results
Business results are always difficult to quantify when we are in a learning and development context. The world of learning design has tools to measure the success of training interventions. A popular methodology was devised by James Kirkpatrick and published in his book Four levels of training evaluation.
The first level concerns the reaction of the learners to the training. Did they like it? Was it clear? The second level looks at learning itself. The employees who participated in the training may have found the session interesting, but that does not mean that they have actually learned the content. This is what this level is trying to evaluate.
When you get to the third level it starts to get more interesting because this is where you look for behavioral changes. The students may have enjoyed what they saw and understood from the training, but have they changed the way they behave on the job? The fourth level is the most complicated. It’s about business results. Here you try to link ROI to the training and see whether, for example, the 2% increase in turnover that you expected from the training has actually arrived. Obviously, it’s difficult to do this, as most tangible business results are the result of a sum of several variables and can’t really be thought of as the result of one thing.
Yet the intangible and cultural results that come from a lifelong learning mindset are clear. Hiring one is sure to empower any business, provide better opportunities for employees, reaffirm your commitment to developing your team, and ultimately improve business outcomes.
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Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.