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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

Promoting Learning in the Workplace: A Comprehensive Guide

The concept of a ‘company culture’ has been gathering steam, and it holds a lot of importance for existing and potential employees alike.

In the past, the benefits package you offered was enough to entice and retain employees, but this simply isn’t the case anymore. Employees today want a positive working environment that promotes learning and facilitates their professional development. This might seem like a daunting task, but it is easier than you think; read on to learn more.

The Importance of Offering Learning Opportunities

Many employees want a job that will offer the progression opportunities and help them turn their job into a career. This is why they are often incredibly eager to learn and develop within their roles, it comes down to education vs experience. While it is true that there will be employees who are happy to simply sit within their roles without looking for their next opportunity, depending on the industry, they tend to be outliers. Employees who don’t have access to the training or the opportunities to progress and grow in their roles often leave for a job that will provide this. If your business has lower levels of employee retention, this could be why.

Companies that strive to create a more positive atmosphere and develop the right company culture often find that they have lower levels of employee turnover. This is because employees tend to be more engaged with their jobs and, therefore, more motivated and productive. In order to ensure your business remains as competitive as possible, it also makes sense to promote learning in order to develop your talent continually. As the industry advances, hiring top talent at the time won’t guarantee that you will always be the top talent. Without continual learning, their knowledge will likely stagnate and even become obsolete. Implementing a team building personality test can also aid in understanding and fostering better communication and collaboration among team members.

Traditionally, many workers were happy to enter the workforce and stay within an organization or a role until they retired. This is because loyalty was prized and rewarded. Today’s generation doesn’t allow loyalty to hold the same credence that it once did; they are more mobile than ever, showing higher levels of ambition. This trend is likely to continue. This is partly what makes driving engagement among your staff so challenging. Even if your business has limited opportunities to progress, allowing and encouraging your staff to develop their skills can still help to keep them engaged for longer, even if they do end up moving on.

Learning should be encouraged but optional because there will be employees among your workforce who aren’t as interested, especially if your workforce is multi-generational. Your company culture needs to be inclusive of everyone and geared towards all demographics. All this is simply to say encouraging learning and offering opportunities to do so is a strategic move on your part. It is an important tool that can be used to drive productivity and engagement. While developing a training program and offering learning opportunities can be expensive, it is a worthwhile investment because it can help to drive the business’s success. You can also be selective when determining what you want your staff to learn. You could choose to develop a curriculum that centers around your business’s goals to ensure that all staff are up to speed.

Developing Learning Opportunities

The very first thing that you should do when thinking about what learning opportunities you want to offer your staff is to ask them. Developing programmes that there is no interest in is a waste of time and resources. You can easily put together a list of options and then offer that list out to the staff using something like Vevox, which is a live poll app that would allow your employees to vote, and you can quickly garner which topics have the most interest. You can also offer options as to what form the training should take. This could be e-learning, training schemes, workshops or practical-based training sessions. Obviously, this is heavily dependent on the industry within which you were operating.

Learning and advancement often go hand-in-hand. This isn’t to say that promotions and progression opportunities should hinge on whether the candidate has undertaken a specific training course as opposed to focussing on their merits. However, they can often be used to gauge what type of person the employee is and whether they demonstrate initiative and have the drive necessary or not. If you want to encourage the learning to take place, then a reward scheme or incentive can help to increase the turnout and ensure that your efforts aren’t wasted.

The next port of call should be increasing awareness of your new training programmes; without doing so, how are your employees to know about them or access them? You could send out email blasts or pin notices to the noticeboard in the office or breakroom or wherever. You also need to make sure that they can access the services, whether this means uploading the e-learning into the intranet or scheduling them to allow employees to take time off from their tasks to attend seminars, et cetera.

It would help if you also worked harder to emphasize the connection between an enthusiasm for learning and an improved performance at work. A desire to learn and a thirst for knowledge should be seen as an asset. This is why encouragement is key. You can also try to find ways to integrate learning within the business as a whole. Learning doesn’t always have to be a big production or come from external sources. It can be easily handled in-house. Simply encouraging knowledge sharing within your workforce can work. Those higher up in the business or even people working in different departments can share their knowledge and expertise to ensure that each employee has a more well-rounded base of knowledge when it comes to the business.

Employee reviews are also an excellent learning opportunity for both employees and the management team as well. Feedback is critical when it comes to identifying weaknesses or other gaps in knowledge on both sides. You can then develop a plan for how to shore up the weaknesses or fill the gaps. During the review, you can also compliment the employee on what they did well too and perhaps even ask them to share their tactics and strategies. It also allows employees to provide feedback to you on how you can improve.

Learning doesn’t stop at the junior level in the business, either. Management should also be demonstrating a willingness to learn within their roles too. You could even develop a training scheme for managers to whereby they learn how to be a better managers. Coaching employees is not necessarily easy, and if you aren’t coaching your staff well, you aren’t encouraging their best performance.

The final step is to assess the success of your new approach. Obviously, learning has a direct outcome that ideally translates into a better performance and overall success for the business. You need to find a way to assess whether the knowledge they have learnt is applicable and, if so, is it being applied correctly. Ask your employees whether they have found the new approach useful. You can also pull the data to see if it has been beneficial.

To Conclude

Today’s generation of workers is different from previous years. They understand their worth more deeply and they are willing to fight for what they want. This can often feel jarring to employers who are used to taking on a more authoritarian role in business management. Employees today value partnerships. They want equal treatment. Building the right company culture is important, as is providing learning opportunities to keep your employees engaged and ensure that they understand their value.