Our current blog series has focused on the ways L&D creates opportunities for growth. To wrap up this series, we'll focus this week and the next posts on the importance of creating a learning culture. To begin today, we'll emphasize why creating a learning culture is so important for your organization.
A learning culture creates an environment where growth through learning is expected, celebrated, and intentionally fostered.
Why Create a Learning Culture?
Organizations that embed learning at the heart of their overall processes intentionally find ways to use that learning as a way to benefit the whole. Learning is not just viewed as necessary for compliance or as an organizational add-on, but instead helps employees and the organization to grow. A learning culture creates an environment where learning is celebrated and makes a tangible difference within the organization. Here are a few areas where a learning culture can generate big rewards:
More effective training and development - a big challenge for L&D teams, or workplace training in general, is how to measure the ROI on training dollars spent. Whether it's in person learning, a hybrid approach, or fully online asynchronous learning, there's often a significant investment of time and money required for even a minimal amount of gain. By creating a learning culture, an organization can work more intentionally to determine where L&D is making the greatest impact, gather data, evaluate what's working and not working, and make more informed decisions. Without a culture of learning this type of focused evaluation is likely left undone and misses a huge opportunity for ongoing growth.
Aligning learning with organizational priorities - a learning culture creates an overall environment for growth to be centered and prioritized. As this happens, learning is better harnessed to realize organizational priorities. Learning that is celebrated and intentionally designed is much more likely to help the organization grow over time. This can take shape in a number of ways, and we'll share more on this in a couple of weeks, but for now, it's important to recognize the ways in which creating a culture of learning opens up new avenues for aligning learning with the overall health and growth of the organization, especially in addressing areas like skills gaps, or high employee turnover.
Engaging employees - a culture of learning encourages employees to embrace a lifelong learning mindset and engages them more fully in their own ongoing growth. One of the ways this happens is through how the value of learning is communicated, discussed, and celebrated within the organization. This focus translates into embracing learning as an ongoing and necessary part of the organization, which in turn creates more natural avenues for employees to grow in their roles, expand their skills, and determine how they can best align their learning with the organizational needs.
Creating a learning culture can provide real gains for any organization that is seeking to grow, develop leaders, and engage employees. Click the box below to learn how Lightbox can help your organization design a learning culture to help your teams grow.
Lightbox provides a range of solutions to help your organization thrive. Contact us below to learn more.
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