How to Build a Learning Culture: 7 Useful Tips

The Gallup data statistics showed the astonishing results: 70% of workers are disengaged doing their job. It looks as if they are working, however, such employees show lower productivity and enthusiasm, let alone loyalty towards the company’s values. The problem is that the organization loses not only engaged workforce – but also potential opportunities and profit it could make. Look at how such giants as Cisco and Google increase their employees satisfaction.

Notice the “Working Dead”

No doubt, you see these office members on a regular basis:

• they constantly make mistakes, more often than the others;
• they spoil the working atmosphere;
• they are all in their mobile phones – not in the job tasks;
• they are bad in cooperation with colleagues.

The worst thing about disengaged employees is that they not only are bad in performing job duties, but also that they destroy the whole corporate environment and relationships among the office team.

Let Them Feel Alive

The problem of finding strategies to engage employees is not unique for your company. In accordance with Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015 research , there are at least 3300 of the explored companies that state employees’ engagement as №1 difficulty.

Thus, what are the practices of bringing the disengaged ones back to life? Create a learning culture among employees – a perfect tool to make them alive. A concept of learning culture means a long-term system for employees’ engagement and education when learning becomes a part of the company’s tasks. As the Human Capital Institute (HCI) mentions, building learning culture in company for staff members brings mutual development to business goals and employees’ engagement.

Learning culture helps:

• your workers to develop professional skills;
• your T&D specialists to train stuff members and create a sense of team among them;
• the company’s business to raise employees’ commitment to the company.

The worldwide technological company Cisco encourages employees' creativity. During a course on leadership development, the managers had a task to create their own businesses in terms of their development plans. One of such initiatives was The Cisco Telepresence – now this innovation is a successful part of the Cisco company.

According to Bersin by Deloitte statement learning culture strategies for employees’ development are a part of the internal policies of such global companies as UPS, Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others.

How to Create a Learning Culture in an Organization:

Now you, perhaps, feel that your company needs significant changes in HR and training policies. How to create a learning culture in your organization? We suggest some basic steps:

1. Consider learning practices: think of eLearning that has easy-to-use interface even without extra IT skills. Moreover, it’s a bargain for a limited T&D budget. In addition, employees can learn through a combination of lectures and interactive simulations , so they feel engaged.

   eLearning is one of MasterCard’s solutions to create a learning culture and promote it among employees. The company uses gamification and animation to develop information security compliance skills. Workers here are presented as superheroes who defend MasterCard data.

2. Try learning systems available online that make it possible to watch lectures, pass tests and access the employees’ learning results 24/7.
3. Work at employees’ gaps. For each employee find skills he needs for performing his job duties show the lack of them now. It works as a perfect motivation to improve skills. That’s also a kind of “fright-factor” that reveals what kind of improvement is mandatory for a worker to stay professional.
4. Choose valuable courses. Think of learning that is a mutual benefit for the company and your employees. Leadership, finance, management – choose the courses that make employees feel they are working at their career development. It proves to be a good way to promote professional development in the workplace.
5. Devote time to learning. Find some extra-hours for employees to study. That means the company is concerned about employees’ development. That’s a good practice to raise employees’ commitment.
6. Reward the best employees. Everyone aims to show better results than his colleague. Use it for a good competitive spirit on the workplace.
7. Involve company’s management into learning process. If the key managers show they are interested with training, employees see that learning is everyone’s practice in the company. That brings sense of cooperation.

Wake employees up – engage them and motivate to develop professionally. Eduson helps you do it easily and effectively! Try it now for free!

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