Producing an environment that loves to learn means valuing, encouraging and prioritising development in the workplace and adopting learning as a core value.

Why Should Companies Strive to Create a Rich Learning Culture?

Whilst actively encouraging learning and development can be a big investment, both in terms of time and money, it is proven to be worth doing:

• Investing in staff development can have a fantastic impact on retention - 94% employees said investment in training and development is one of the main reasons they would decide to stay in a role for longer.
• Organisations that work to create a rich learning culture and encourage development report seeing at least a 30% increase in productivity.
• Statistics show that companies who nurture their workforce’s desire to learn are 30% more likely to become industry leaders and achieve outstanding results.

Despite the undeniable benefits of investing in creating a learning-rich environment, only 10% of organisations have successfully embedded learning into their values and culture.

How Can You Become Part of the Top 10%?

Getting started with creating a workforce that loves to learn can seem daunting and overwhelming at first, especially if this is something your organisation has never truly looked into before. 

To help you get started, we have identified 4 steps below that you can take to encourage learning in the workplace:

1. Lead by Example

Before looking at L&D strategies or employees’ attitudes to learning, leaders should first look at themselves and how they approach learning. Employees often follow in their leader’s footsteps so if leaders themselves don’t make time to learn and continuously develop themselves, employees will likely also neglect development. This means that in order to create a rich learning culture, leaders need to demonstrate their passion and dedication to development and encourage staff to adopt the same attitude to learning.

2. Career Coaching

A common reason for employees’ lack of interest in learning is uncertainty about where their career is headed. A great way to help with this is through career coaching. This can either be done internally or externally using a career coaching specialist. Helping staff carve a clear pathway for their career enables them to better identify what skills they need to learn and can be extremely motivating as it gives them a clear goal to work towards.

3. Allow Dedicated Time for Learning

Concerningly, research shows that on average, employees only have time for 24 minutes of learning per week. Whilst we may be reluctant to allow staff dedicated time for learning and development as it takes them away from their day-to-day responsibilities, the long term benefits far outweigh the short term inconvenience. For example, one of the benefits of upskilling staff is that learning new, better ways of doing things can make employees much more efficient, saving them time in the future, essentially providing a return on the time invested into learning. 

4. Invest in Professional Training

Following on from allowing dedicated time for learning, one of the most popular ways of encouraging staff development is investing in professional training courses. Putting staff through training not only solidifies their existing competencies but also provides them with a strong foundation of actionable knowledge and theory upon which they can then build upon. If you are interested in training your staff and would like to know what courses we can provide for you, please click here to view our 2021 Products and Services brochure.

{{ADVERT}}

---

To summarise this 2-part series, you can produce an environment that loves to learn by giving your employees the time, tools and support they need to grow and develop to help boost productivity and performance, putting your organisation on the path to outperforming your competition and becoming successful industry leaders.

We hope that this series has inspired and enabled you to create a better workplace.

Until next time…