THE TRAINING ENVIRONMENT – By Nettie Bonham
Leaders plant seeds for growth
Few things have more impact on an organization’s success than the health of its learning culture. According to research compiled by LinkedIn, employees who spend time at work learning are 39% more likely to feel productive and successful, 23% more ready to take on additional responsibilities and 21% more likely to feel confident and happy.
Such findings invite the question: How can you as a learning professional best promote a culture that will help your organization thrive?
When considering how to foster a strong learning culture, it can be useful to think of a successful organization as a flourishing garden. Leaders plant seeds for growth, which then germinate and are cultivated within the organization.
Enriching your culture is, then, simply a matter of knowing which steps you can take to make it prosper. Let’s take a closer look at what these are.
Enrich the Soil
A healthy learning culture is rooted in a few essential elements: open communication, an emphasis on continuous learning and a value of diversity. Your learning culture will thrive when participants see connections between disparate trainings and are comfortable openly and honestly expressing what they don’t know.
To achieve this in your organization:
- Model continuous learning from the top down that values curiosity, vulnerability and risk taking. Leaders should be encouraged to be transparent about their development goals, celebrate experimentation and frame mistakes as opportunities.
- Define a code for organizational growth that clearly articulates how your organization invites differences in perspective and values diversity.
- Conduct voice-of-the-learner assessments for participants to communicate both their aspirations and their skill gaps without judgement. This practice will help you gauge and scope future learning initiatives. To encourage honest communication, consider making the responses anonymous.
- Be deliberate in creating meeting spaces where leaders, managers and learners can openly discuss such things as learning needs and development requests.
Sow the Right Seeds
Once you’ve enriched the soil, it’s essential to treat each new learning experience as an opportunity to cultivate seeds for growth. Though these opportunities may range widely — from formal presentations and workshops to self-led elearning and touchpoints — they should all be designed to:
- Be relevant:
- Invite your learners to take ownership of their training by playing a role insetting their development goals. When learners set their own goals, they are more likely to feel personally invested in achieving them.
- Schedule time quarterly or semi-annually for learners to use guided questions to help them reflect on their learning goals, evaluate their progress and correct course as needed.
- Be realistic:
- Design learning scenarios and examples to be as true as possible to learners’ experience in their roles.
- Extend problem-solving skills beyond the classroom. Interview team members to identify the leading challenges they face in their roles, then bring together groups of learners to discuss ways to overcome these challenges. Encourage these groups to continue meeting on a regular basis.
- Be achievable:
- Make sure learning objectives are clearly articulated and performance-focused.
- Provide constructive feedback consistently to guide and spur ongoing improvement.
- Ensure learners have seamless access to the tools and resources essential to their role. These may include a data analytics platform, a decision tree map or a planning template with an example of what good looks like.
- Boost social learning through peer collaborations and job-shadowing programs.
Weed and Water Regularly
Remember, a healthy learning culture – no matter how well established – can never be taken for granted. You must tend to it regularly on both a micro and macro level.
To help evaluate the impact of each learning event from multiple perspectives, establish a committee of stakeholders that includes leaders, managers, training team members and learners. This committee should focus on two essential questions:
- Did learners find the experience engaging and applicable to their roles? To help assess this, ask committee members if they would recommend the experience to colleagues as well as why they would or would not.
- Did the experience prepare learners to perform successfully? When answering this question, explain to the committee that their understanding of performance should be aligned with and measured by business outcomes. For example: the increase in the number of reimbursement issues resolved on a first-time call.
Though all these steps are crucial, there is one overarching rule that may be more important than the rest: Be adaptable.
Conclusion
To extend our metaphor, a healthy learning culture — like a thriving garden — will constantly evolve as it reacts to myriad outside forces. Never be so rigid about what you think should work that you ignore the obvious.
Don’t hesitate to discard practices that aren’t producing results and replace them with something new. Remember, you ask your learners to look on mistakes as opportunities. Always be willing to accept your own advice.
Nettie Bonham is a senior learning strategist and project lead at Encompass Communications and Learning. Email Nettie at nbonham@encompasscnl.com or connect through www.linkedin.com/in/nettie-longietti-bonham-766a5110/.
