A “learning culture” is a term that is thrown about a lot these days, often without people fully understanding what it means. Firstly, before you grasp what a learning culture is – and a good one at that – you need to understand what a learning culture is and why you should establish one within your organisation.
What is it? A learning culture refers to how a group of people learn or pass on information – so the way in which they absorb knowledge and the environment where they learn.
Establishing a learning culture, particularly in a workplace, is vital for allowing continuous improvement. Without a proper environment to learn in, people tend to become stagnated and lose their motivation for work. By implementing a learning culture within your organisation, this promotes regular sessions where people can get together and share ideas; where they can discover more about how other people work and, most importantly, where they can feel like their ideas and knowledge are being appreciated.
Okay, so now you know what a learning culture is and why it’s important to have one, but how do you make it successful? Luckily, you can break this down into 4 simple steps:
- Create continuous learning opportunities – a learning culture only works if it is consistent, make sure you set aside time on a regular basis to gather people together for learning, instilling the frequency in them and making it a part of their routine.
- Promote dialogue – one big mistake that is made when trying to establish a learning culture, is going too far back to basics. People nowadays don’t want to be lectured, they want to be listened to; enable this by encouraging conversation and feedback in learning sessions and allow different individuals to take ownership of different areas of the learning programme.
- Make learning easy – it’s one thing to establish a learning culture, but if you’re then asking people to go through 2-hour long webinars and write up their feedback twice a week, it’s not going to stick. The learning needs to be interactive, easy to understand and impart knowledge without becoming either boring or tiresome. Consider bite-sized modules and interactive options where people can answer questions or share their experiences.
- Show the results – without a doubt you’re going to get great team and individual wins from these learning sessions, so firstly, make sure to reward this. Don’t let collaboration and team learning go unnoticed. Shout out great pieces of work that have been developed in these sessions, show the wider organisation what has been achieved and share the learning on a wider scale. There’s not a person alive who doesn’t appreciate praise, so if someone does something good, make sure you tell them!
These straightforward steps should enable you to establish a learning culture in your organisation with ease, benefitting both you and your employees. With a learning culture in place, you should see an increase in both employee satisfaction and retention rates, which over time has been proven to lead to an increase in revenue.
One key thing to remember with a learning culture to ensure its continued success is that you continue to reiterate its importance. A learning culture only works if everyone is on board, so if someone isn’t pulling their weight, or if there is push back from senior managers – for example, not making time for learning and expecting employees to simply learn on top of their daily work – then a learning culture will struggle and ultimately fail.
How Boxphish can help
At Boxphish, we try to echo the values of a successful learning culture across everything we do – this is why our courses are bite-sized and interactive. We use short video clips to demonstrate knowledge in a light-hearted yet informative manner and then immediately test what users have learned through gamification and quiz questions. Results are immediately shared with the user, and opportunities provided to learn further if they have struggled with the content.
To find out how you can integrate Boxphish learning into your organisation, schedule in a demo request with one of our team.