How Important It is to Create A Learning Culture?

“The Role of a creative leaders is not to have all the ideas;it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they are values” -Ken Robinson

Introduction

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Culture is like the air we breathe. Culture is hard, not soft and is created, reinforced and often destroyed by leaders. Learning culture is a set of organizational values, conventions, processes, and practices that encourage individuals—and the organization as a whole—to increase knowledge, competence, and performance. Learning culture is very business-relevant and not at all academic. A learning organization’s culture is characterized by openness to new ideas, supportive learning environment, time for reflection and psychological safety. Further, systems will be in place for information collection and analysis, experimentation and leadership reinforces learning.

Why Learning Culture?

Learning culture improves employee engagement and leads to higher retention. Further, in a learning culture business processes become more efficient & streamlined and there would be higher ROI and long- term success. In the annual survey of “elite organizations” conducted by Fortune and the Hay Group, the results continually show the one thing each of these elite organizations has in common is that their corporate cultures value people and how they learn.

Further, learning culture offers source of competitive advantage and helps organization get better at getting better. Learning culture constantly discover new ways to satisfy customer needs, new ways to develop and deliver product and services and inspires ordinary people to learn how to prosper in an increasingly turbulent world.

Before go further, let’s look at the top Trends in The Corporate Sector and What It Will Mean for the L&D sector

a. Leader’s Who Impact Matter

Leaders are no longer just the ones that hold the fort, but they include any individual that makes a sizeable impact in their specific role within the organisation. So companies need to extend leadership programs to those beyond the management and reach out to high- performing individuals with a willingness to develop their leadership capabilities.

b.Importance Of “Bigdata”

Many organizations now have a greater volume of information at their disposal. Enterprise data is expected to grow by 650% in the next 5 years. Great volume of data means a greater potential for companies to process this data into insights for the business and to predict trends. So focus should be on equipping the leaders with the necessary skills to leverage on the data available to steer the organisation in the right direction.

c.Globalization

In an increasingly globalised environment, the need for a global outlook in development initiatives becomes increasingly vital. Some of the challenges L&D has to contend with include cultural differences within the workforce and juggling the specific business challenges in each country or locale that the organisation operates in. Focus should be on key competencies for global leadership programmes that include change management, ability to influence and build coalitions, critical thinking and problem solving.

d.Learning Becoming Mobile By 2O15

The global mobile workforce is expected to grow to 1.3 billion people, of which, most have grown so used to information that is accessible at our fingertips through smart devices. Not only that, employee mobile access is also increasing thanks to the “Bring-your-own-device” trend. In line with the growing trend of mobile workforce and growing usage of smart devices for information retrieval and learning, Learning & Development should consider mobile corporate learning programmes in terms of both training and performance support.

e.Core Skills Development

As the economy strengthens, developing core skills becomes essential to thrive. The focus will no longer just be on highly targeted modules that meet short-term business needs and developing core skills will re-emerge as vital training.Examples of core skills include effective communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

f.More Transparent Procedures

Businesses are expected to be more transparent in the way they communicate about different processes, e.g., selection processes for hiring, career advancement, development opportunities and performance review criteria.

g.Rising Turnover

As job markets improve, there is a high expectation that turnover rates will increase correspondingly. Organizations should look into developing engaging training programmes as a way to inculcate employee loyalty, build closer relationships and keep employees invested in the organisation. Not only that, they may want to explore training programmes that improves time-to-productivity to mitigate the productivity loss during which it takes to train an employee to optimum productivity.

How to Build a Learning Culture

“63%high performing companies have found a direct correlation between learning and business performance.”

Before attempting to build a learning culture, the authorities concerned need to assess Organizational Culture by giving a quiz to managers and business leaders. They can also conduct focus groups with employees or customers; strategize at a retreat, business planning session, or at staff meetings. The following Questions can be considered to assess the Organizational Learning Culture?

• Whether leaders constantly emphasize the benefits of learning and lead by example by investing in their own personal development.
• Whether employees are helped to create their "own career development plans" as a formal process.
  
• Any Process in place to encourage "innovative ideas" or "best cost-cutting idea" and other process improvement suggestions.
  
• Whether internal discussions take place on “spending on training vs. benefits realized" and take time to analyze the impact of our training interventions.
  
• Whether hiring from within is encouraged through “internal job postings" .
  
• Is there a Learning Management System that allows people to monitor their formal training programs and self-subscribe to e-Learning courses.
  
• Is there an internal portal to encourage people to "freely exchange information and know-how" on topics of mutual interest.
  

If most of the responses are in affirmative that means organisation has a great learning culture or else a well-planned road map is required for creating a successful impact. On the otherhand, if most of the responses are negative, organization isn’t prepared to engage and learning culture has to be strengthened.

How Do You Create Learning Culture?

• Recognize workers who learn new information and abilities
• Emphasize learning as an important activity and ensure knowledge exists throughout the organization.
  
• Create opportunities for staff to teach each other and “Collaboration with other employees” should be the way to learn.
  
• Communicate “customer ideas and solutions within the company” and ensure “most employees can explain” the firm’s beliefs to outsiders.
  
• Invest time, money, and resources in learning, and get buy-in from leadership and management.
  
• Promote knowledge-sharing and empower employees to take charge of their own learning
  
• Show, don’t just tell and last but not the least measure, measure, measure.
  

Conclusion

As we all know, learning and change go hand in hand. Without a focus on learning, change is slow and costly to implement, something no organization can afford in the world we are living in today. Given the fact that in the current scenario, where all other resources are available, accessible and affordable and only human resource provides the required cutting edge, an organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage creating an learning organisation is the need of the hour[sine-quo-non].Because obsolete technology is dangerous but obsolete human resource is disastrous.

By Dr A Jagan Mohan Reddy