Creating a culture of learning in the workplace
If you want to keep your most valued employees, you need to ensure that they feel a part of the organisation. This means making sure your employees feel alignment with the company’s mission and culture.
Everything you do as an organisation should tie into your culture, including learning and development. Connecting learning and skills development with company strategy, culture and an employee’s functional role creates a meaningful context that can motivate that employee to engage with learning opportunities.
Says Udemy Business in its 2023 Workplace Learning Trends report:
“There’s no other way to secure employee commitment to the hard work that’s required. That means organisational strategy for success and growth has to include defining and evolving culture and then tying culture into the learning strategy. Building meaningful culture is easy to say, but hard to do. Companies must do more than just disseminate a list of values or offer benefits and perks. Organisational culture needs to be articulated through behaviours and reinforced through everyday processes and practices.”
Deeply embedded learning is an essential element of a healthy culture that drives employee engagement. Udemy says:
“A strategic learning organisation identifies technical and leadership skills needed for both the employee and organisation to be successful, as well as role-specific skills that are integrated into distinct learning paths. This approach addresses diverse learning needs where they arise to meet the challenges of an evolving hybrid workplace.”
Where learning is connected to work culture and strategy, employees are able to see a clear career path for themselves, which is key to engaging and retaining talent.
Ensuring employees are acquiring the skills needed for upcoming roles also goes some way to ensuring the organisation’s success moving forward.
A sense of belonging
Across industries, employees are harder to retain than ever before. That is one good reason why creating a culture of belonging is important – if employees feel they belong, they are more likely to stay within the organisation. Also, recent research suggests that employees with “a strong sense of belonging” perform 56% better than their colleagues.
However, says Brainer, in its report Accelerating Growth and Belonging for All:
“Leadership often makes the mistake of treating issues like belonging as homogenous problems to be addressed with a standardised playbook instead of developing tailored, timely solutions that can meet the unique needs of their particular organisations. Similarly, belonging is not a ‘one-and-done’ problem that is fixed with a single event. Leaders need to treat it instead as an ongoing area of focus that will change and evolve as your culture and employee experience change along the way. Learning and development professionals can contribute to a culture of belonging and growth in a variety of important ways.”
Tailored training
Organisations looking to become places of belonging need to recognise that generic, one-size-fits-all learning won’t work in engaging and retaining staff.
Says Brainier:
“Industries today change too quickly for a ‘command and control’ approach to learning. Building a culture of learning and belonging requires removing the barriers to learning and creating structures that promote growth and contribute to a sense of comfort and belonging at work. Removing these barriers must begin by understanding things from your employees’ perspective.”
Employers should seek to understand what their people want from learning, what they need to excel in their roles, and what is effective or ineffective.
Brainier continues:
“This shift in mindset toward a more decentralised, nimble learning model can contribute to a broader culture of learning and belonging because it directly involves your people in process and gives them a sense of ownership. In addition, learning from their peers can give the learning experience a more authentic, homegrown feel that your people are more likely to respond to positively than a homogenised corporate learning video.”
Conclusion
In the modern world of work, learning experiences are rewarding, engaging and accessible to all. Learning done right supports internal mobility and exists to enable engagement, performance and innovation in the workplace.
According to Brainier, for a culture of belonging to exist, your employees need to know that they are supported in their career and learning goals with the time, technology, and space to do it when, where, and how they want:
“When you take the time to understand what your people want and need, you can begin to identify and prioritise the gaps in your learning programs. Whether you prioritise technological or content-based improvements first, the aim should always be to promote a culture of belonging through learning that is relevant, individualised, flexible, and accessible to all your people.”
Udemy adds:
“Those who support learning of essential skills as a foundational element of a stronger, more vibrant culture will see not only higher employee engagement, but a better-prepared workforce. With a comprehensive, integrated approach to learning that is fine-tuned to the needs of individual teams and learners, organisations will be poised for future growth and well-equipped to handle disruptive change from any source. When learning and culture are closely aligned, they mutually reinforce each other, creating a powerful flywheel for employee and company growth.”
related content
