‘Continuous learning’ as the term implies is largely encouraged by organisations globally today with employers understanding facts – that the future generations of the workforce only seek opportunities with companies that offer beyond salary. The need to learn and grow, motivates millennials in particular, who will soon be reigning the workforce of tomorrow.
The next generation workforce want to work for companies, that provide continuous learning as an integral part of the workplace culture. MNCs are now stepping up efforts to bridge the industry-academia divide by providing training programs that support employee growth and development to assume leadership roles.
See also: How to Deal with Employees Who Quit Trying and Give up Easily?
There has been flux in investments made by organisations as recently to create a culture of continuous learning in the workplace. This enables the workforce to learn collectively, share and imbibe new skills, exchange ideas, fosters creativity, and empowers them to be able to adapt to change.
Here are some easy hacks that HR personnel can adopt to create a culture of continuous learning:
One valuable benefit employers can provide to develop a culture of continuous learning at work is by providing training reimbursement. Monetary reimbursement does attract and motivates employees to perform. This drives them inertly to step up efforts to be able to grapple with change, learn new skills and imply them in their daily workings to innovate for business growth.
Reimbursing employees for learning in itself can seem to be quite a crazy idea to execute, especially when organisations are already pumping in huge investments into L&D initiatives.
While L&D is encouraged at one end of the spectrum, there is another side to employee empowerment that gets ignored during the process of development of a L&D strategy. What truly motivates all employees easily?
Employees need to see measurable returns, as do employers. One of the way to get workforce engaged and prepped up for the future, is to provide them with opportunities for growth and quantify their progress through measurable reimbursement strategies. Perks, benefits and monetary emoluments do motivate, and this fact can be least ignored.
Perhaps, MNCs and global organisations do have the scale of resources to set-up an in-house library to foster a culture of learning and sharing.
Also interesting fun-activities can be organised by HR personnel, wherein participation from employees to showcase their knowledge and skills gets recognised and appreciated.
Employers could also provide allowance to employees for purchase of books to master the subject area of interest and expertise. This will help create a culture of continuous learning in the workplace.
While some employees are open to sharing and training others, there are some others who need a platform to showcase their skills. Such employees are generally introverts at work, who though read and know, but seldom share.
These personnels should be encouraged to mentor other individuals in the team, creative brainstorming sessions that allow employees to express and speak about their learnings during the week should be conducted.
HR managers and employers should hold an open discussion forum about success and failures of each department and congratulate efforts of winning teams. Succinctly, organisations in the endeavour to excellence, should encourage cross-learning and creative collaboration to build a solid teamwork and employee engagement.
We have been talking at length on the importance of onboarding right for the new hires. When new employee joins the team, it takes time for them to adjust to the new workplace environment and team workings.
Here is when, mentorship plays a key role to help the new talent onboard understand the needs of their purposeful actions towards supporting the overall bigger picture of organisation’s growth path. Besides monetary compensation and job satisfaction that matters, only a culture of continuous learning will make key talent stay.
Employers can develop a culture of continuous learning by setting clear learning goals to be achieved by employees in a specific period of time.
Whether it’s acquiring new skills or fine-tuning an old one, employers should supervise, train and retrain employees on their learning by checking in their progress at periodic intervals.
Only those employers who can train talent to keep up with the demands of the industry and provide a culture of continuous learning, would be reaping the benefits of a capable workforce, equipped with skill competencies to create a valuable breakthrough with innovation in the progressive economy. The life-long learners are precious assets of every organisation, as these workforce seek growth aligned with company vision.
Next read: How to Recognise Future Leaders and Reward Them Right?
