Staying ahead in an increasingly competitive marketplace depends heavily on a business’s ability to adapt, pivot, and use disruption as an opportunity to innovate. But we live in a world of constant and accelerating change, where the average shelf life of skills is usually just two to five years.
This is particularly challenging given your best performers are also the busiest. Full calendars leave little room for attending training sessions or devoting time to focused learning—especially if it involves logging into a complicated online system that’s hard to access and not enjoyable to use.
Besides, the most effective learning happens in the flow of work. A lot of research has shown that learning is all about context! If you keep people in the workflow and provide them with the right tools, the learning is much more impactful, it happens faster, plus it’s more cost-effective.
In talking to multiple high-impact learning organizations, our company has seen a trend—focusing on solutions that incentivize continuous learning and make it easy for your employees to embed these activities into their daily routines by letting them learn when, where how it suits them. Doing this also helps to make learning habits stick!
Multiple studies have shown that companies with a strong learning culture perform better than those without. And given that everyday work is essentially just a series of problems to solve and decisions to make, embedding microlearning (with both internal and external content) into the working day leads to much better business outcomes.
If you want a more vital, more resilient learning organization, there are a number of things to keep in mind. Based on personal experience and speaking to multiple big enterprise companies with high-impact learning cultures, here are three key insights:
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Make sure your learning tools are optimized for a digital and dispersed workforce
Hybrid work is here to stay. We know that 83 percent of workers prefer it, and 63 percent of high-growth companies already operate under a “productivity anywhere” model. Due to the increase in people working when and where it’s most convenient for them, work is now getting done from multiple platforms, especially smartphones. This means that to do the best job possible, it’s vital that people can access what they need when they need it and from whichever device they prefer. People can quite literally learn anytime and anywhere without the need to block out huge chunks of time on their calendars. Make it easy for them to plug into the tools they need.
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Unlock potential by empowering your employees to take the initiative and steer their development
Capitalizing on the potential of your people is the only way to thrive amidst constant disruption. This means losing the assumption that organizations are best placed to stipulate the exact skills and capabilities people need in order to solve critical business problems and breaking free from the guardrails of what someone was hired to do, certified to do, or expected to do next. Instead, unlock potential by empowering employees to take the initiative, explore passion areas, and identify where they can add the most value. Letting people steer their development paths and promoting individual choice makes learning more meaningful. It also allows people to realize personal value, purpose, and growth—resulting in a more motivated and engaged workforce.
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Invest in the whole person to increase business performance
An employee’s ability to perform at their peak takes much more than business acumen alone, especially now that the lines between work and home are more blurred than ever. An Accenture study found that 64 percent of a person’s potential (i.e., the ability to use their skills and strengths at work) is influenced by whether they feel better across six unique dimensions: emotional/mental, physical, relational, financial, purposeful, and employable—and the companies who help their employees in all of these areas see an increase in business performance and are more profitable.
A strong learning culture makes you more able to adapt and pivot in response to changes in the market and attract and retain the best talent. People (exceptionally high performers) will always gravitate toward organizations that nurture their development and provide an environment for them to flourish and grow. This is supported by LinkedIn research which found 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their development.
If you don’t provide excellent learning opportunities, you’ll lose the best people to the companies. It’s as simple as that.
