Imagine if your employees came together to share knowledge on their areas of expertise, offered to dive deep into their skill sets, and constantly helped their team to learn and grow. This culture of learning in the workplace is certainly an investment, but for businesses that want to help their employees reach their full potential, this investment is worthwhile.

A culture of learning involves employees continually looking to seek, apply and share new skills and knowledge in order to improve both their own individual performance and that of their organisation. By embracing this culture and encouraging employees to grow and get better (a core value here at Liferay!), companies will see a multitide of benefits.

The Benefits of Embracing a Culture of Learning

1. Encourage Agility and Flexibility

One benefit of a culture of learning in any organisation is that it is able to challenge rigid behaviours and opinions, and encourage agility and flexibility instead. As employees continue to develop their knowledge, they'll better become equipped to face challenges, find new solutions and experiment. 

Your organisation's ability to learn faster than the competition will keep you one step ahead. A reduction in closed-minded thinking can only be of value to a business as it will result in an improvement in the overall performance of a team.

2. Increase Productivity Levels

Working in such a culture and being given the chance to learn and grow makes employees feel like they are valued and being supported by their employers. It shows that employers are invested in their personal development and growth, which in turn contributes to an increase their morale, motivation and productivity levels.

3. Improve Employee Engagement and Retention 

Investing in training and development opportunities for employees can increase their levels of engagement. Engaged employees tend to be more involved in and enthusiastic about their work, and therefore drive high performance for the business.

According to Galllup’s report, teams who scored in the top 20% for engagement realised a 41% reduction in absenteeism and 59% less turnover. This highlights the importance of investing in a culture of learning to increase employee engagement and therefore retention.

How Can Companies Embrace a Culture of Learning?

There are a number of strategies that businesses can employ in order to embrace a culture of learning and encourage employees to develop and grow. 

1. Provide Personalised Training for Every Employee

Personalised training for individual employees is one way in which businesses can help to create their own culture of learning. This allows employees to upskill or be reskilled by their company in a way that is far more effective than is the case with standard training.

Personalised training offers employees a tailored or customised approach that matches their own interests, strengths, readiness levels and existing levels of proficiency, while also addressing their future needs. It's crucial to keep your employees' goals in mind when putting these plans together.

Employees gain more control over their own learning journey, which in turn leads to a greater level of interest, more engagement and a desire to pull learning resources in a proactive manner.

2. Get Support from Leadership

It’s crucial for company leaders to be aware of the importance of a culture of learning and to be in full support of it. Leaders need to set the vision for this culture and enforce the training initiatives to ensure the culture gets integrated into the workplace.

One way for leadership to demonstrate their support is to make learning a core organisational value. This will help to guide organisational decisions and drive decision making. Company leaders should also encourage personal growth to motivate employees to embrace the associated benefits and challenges. 

3. Learn to Embrace Failure

No growth and development can take place without a certain amount of discomfort and failure is usually a part of that discomfort. Teaching employees to embrace failure is the best way to empower them to embrace the culture of change by letting them know that a failure is not a disaster from which they cannot recover, but merely a necessary and inevitable step on the way to ensuring a successful change.

Leaders need to promote the idea of failure in both their words and their actions in order for their employees to be able to accept and embrace the idea as a crucial part of their development.

4. Implement Tools to Access and Track Learning

If there are tools available to track learning, it’ll be much easier for both employees and businesses to ensure that they’re progressing in a smooth and successful manner. This also helps companies to analyse statistics and calculate ROI in order to ensure the corporate training program that they’ve implemented is delivering the expected results and therefore represents a good investment. 

Why is a Culture of Learning Crucial Now?

A culture of learning is vital to the success of an organisation in the modern world, allowing them to be sensitive to changes in the outside world, have an awareness of disruptions and be able to take quick action to ensure the survival and even the growth of that organisation in the face of these changes and disruptions. Embracing a culture of learning not only has far reaching impacts for individual employees and teams, but also improves performance at the broader organisation level.