An organisation needs to facilitate its employees with all the skills required to flourish in the industry or the organisation. Don’t you agree? For an organisation to be a global leader it must adapt to the latest changes and work on improving itself constantly. Learning culture will benefit both employees and the organisation. It helps employees to stay up-to-date with current changes or updates in the technology or industry and organisation to gain a competitive advantage in business.
Why is Learning Culture Important?
Developing a learning culture is important for an organisation. All the employees of an organisation engage and work in improving themselves. Learning culture is a collection of organisational values, conventions, processes and practices. It is a simple means to improve the knowledge and competence of the employees and the organisation at large. An organisation with a learning culture encourages its personnel to never stop learning and building a system can help them and influence them in becoming better. If you’re wondering why is learning culture important? Learning is always helpful, you see it can elevate an individual as both worker and person. It not only helps individuals it can work wonders for an organisation too. It can open doors to opportunities that can transform them for the better.
Technology is disrupting many areas of life and work is one of them. Digital revolution has its benefits and drawbacks. Don’t you agree? As it is shifting the dynamics and making work easy like never before, and at the same time it is also shifting the demand for human expertise. Organisations or market, in general, is constantly changing and so are their requirements. LinkedIn’s latest talent research brings to light that current most-in-demand skills were not even present on the list three years ago. To adapt and grow you must always be on a quest to improve your knowledge and feed your curiosity and the only way to do it is learning, constant learning is what will take you there.
Advantages of the Learning culture
There are many benefits an organisation will receive by cultivating a learning culture in their employees. It increases the efficiency and productivity of the employees. Not to forget the money factor involved in it, improved efficiency and productivity will ultimately lead towards monetary benefits. When an organisation is providing its employees with a chance to improve and develop its employees, it reduces employee grievances and reduces employee turnover. Leaning culture develops a sense of accountability and ownership in employees. It even creates a platform for employees to share and grow together with their peers. Improves the mindset of employees and enhances their ability to adapt to changes. Learning culture helps an organisation in bringing their employees together, improve their learning experience and lastly solve problems effectively and quickly.
But to all this to be possible an organisation should build an efficient learning culture.
How to build a learning culture?
Here are a few tips on how to create or build a learning culture in your organisation.
Leadership imperative
For creating a culture in an organisation the leaders should take the initiative. They should reinforce the training initiatives and create a cooperative environment for employees to learn. They have the power to lead their employees, so it becomes a leader’s prime responsibility to lead them towards a better tomorrow. A leader should help them see reality from a different perspective. In your organisations even includes sessions for leaders to cultivate a growth mindset among them. See that they reinforce key behavioural traits such as risk-taking, intellectual curiosity, experimental, learning from failures and managing changes perfectly. As they lead the pack they should act as role models for other employees.
Learning and Performance
You must cultivate the learning behaviour in your employees and also show them the link between their learning and performance. When they understand how their learning can improve their performance at the workplace they would show more interest and give their 100%. They must understand why continuous learning is an integral part of the learning culture. As an organisation, you must show them how learning can be helpful both them and the organisation. It is your responsibility to induce the learning into the daily operations to ensure that learning doesn’t end up being a one-time event but rather become a core part of a culture and organisation.
Apply the learning
What is the point of learning and going on with your daily life? Employees will understand the depth of the learning when they apply it to use. Everything is linked from learning to establishing the applied learning. As you can see, applying the knowledge you learn will improve the performance at all levels in the organisation. Direct superiors will also need coaching tools to work with employees to get the desired outcomes. Knowledge sharing and learning culture will bring behavioural changes and improve employee results. Make sure that every employee is putting the learning into practice and conduct a frequent examination and keep track of their progress. Reinforce the learning through positive appraisals, frequent reinforcement and praise.
Build Mindset open to growth
Not everyone is open to changes even when it is beneficial. Identify such people in your organisation who resist changes and work on them first. For any change to bring a positive impact on your business all your employees must cooperate. Learning culture not only brings new opportunities and policies, but it also brings improvement, efficiency and productivity. And for the true shift in culture, you should first explain to them why learning is important, how it will impact them and organisation as a whole and why you want to bring this change. You should also tell them why they should participate and how constructive feedback from their peers may help them in improving their work. So focus on people with a fixed mindset and help them see the advantages of learning the culture. Everybody’s collective efforts will only make the culture shift possible.
Set goals within teams
Even though you have set managers to track their performance level. It is important to set achievable goals for the members and share them with your team. Make sure your learning goals are transparent so that people take accountability of reaching them. Make sure every team has a coach who can guide the team and know what his peers want to share. Team goals should be connected to the company objectives and should offer all the necessary resources to the team to reach the goal. Lastly, make sure that the goals are SMART and related to the learning culture you want to promote.
Feedback
Feedback plays a crucial role in an individuals development. Most of the organisations focus only on the development, strengths and doesn’t put much emphasis on their weaknesses. Don’t you think it’s time to change that? For a person to improve on anything they must receive constructive feedback from others, be it their superiors or peers. And to improve you must know your shortcomings or limitations. One of the best ways to improve your employees is to provide them with both positive and negative feedback. Make them understand their shortcomings and lend a helping hand in overcoming the obstacles. Giving feedback is a powerful skill and most of the times managers end up giving positive feedback. This hinders with the learning and stops them from being curious. Negative feedback should not be demotivating, it must be constructive and addressed delicately.
Hire curious people
Organisations put more emphasis on the development and training of employees, but they overlook the selection process of employees. You see it is much easier to fix and change than prevent and predict. When you select the right people, in the beginning, it can save you a lot of pain in training and development. If you hire curious people and maximize the fit between their roles and interests and you don’t have to force them to learn, they will naturally be interested in learning and improving themselves. To shift the culture you must need bright and creative people who can help you in coming up with new strategies and show enthusiasm to learn new things. And people who can take lead are the ones that will take your organisation to new heights. So the next time you’re hiring, look for people who can work on their own and are creative.
Conclusion
Every organisation should continuously educate and be on continuous learning phase to improve themselves and their employees. Learning culture is one such paradigm that can bring a change in any organisation and drive themselves towards success. Take an initiative and develop a learning culture in your organisation and remember the change must start from the top and they must set the right example for their employees to follow. This culture shift will help your employees in improving themselves and their skills. When you’re employees are well equipped with all the most in-demand skills then your organisation is bound to get successful and reach all its goals. So, what are you waiting for? Build a strong learning culture and improve both your employees and the organisation.
