Create a Learning Culture: Overcoming Low Support for Learning

Talent professionals know they must create a learning culture before their organizations will be poised for the future. With the rapid advancement of knowledge and technology, if employees don’t operate in a learning culture, their organizations risk becoming outdated and irrelevant.

It’s a fine balance when implementing learning in cultures that are less than eager for training, though. Make training a requirement and participants and their managers can feel micromanaged. Leave it optional and those who need it may never participate. The reality is that sales professionals and frontline teams often prioritize customer commitments over training. And, in most cases, rightly so. It’s difficult to argue that revenue and service priorities should take a backseat to much else in the business.

To create a learning culture and improve participation rates, training needs to feel mandatory, even when it’s optional. “Feeling mandatory” isn’t about creating a culture of compliance or being punitive. Instead, participants should experience learning as an essential tool that undeniably supports them in achieving their goals. They should regret not participating in learning because they know that NOT attending means they’ve missed out. This only happens when their learning has a direct connection to their work. It must increase their ability to increase sales, better service customers, manufacture to high quality, and problem solve and interact with their peers and others.

Create a Learning Culture, Reap Benefits

Talent development leaders know the benefits when they take action to create a learning culture and advance the priority of development. Bridging the gap from the current learning culture to a new learning culture can be a struggle. Where to start?

• Design every learning asset around behaviors that will drive performance metrics. Better to have a few meaningful assets that are wildly relevant than complex learning journeys filled with ‘nice to have’ knowledge.
• Build examples, cases and practices around real-world scenarios for all representative participant roles, even if that means you need many options for different scenarios. It’s additional work up front, but it fast-forwards participants’ ability to apply what they are learning. It’s also a stress test for your content. If you cannot find examples that are meaningful and demonstrate a ‘better way,’ your learning isn’t relevant enough.
• Wherever possible, use learning in the flow of work as your primary means of learning. This isn’t to say that learning events are not key to success. But, when you’re faced with a low drive-for-learning-culture, you eliminate objections to attendance by building training into work that is already happening.

These and other strategies can help create a learning culture where participation isn’t forced and reactionary, but desired and demanded by our teams. Learn more about how we design and implement learning that is ‘must have.’

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