For businesses to grow, you need to hire top talent or cultivate skills internally. Working with your team provides a number of benefits to businesses that you don’t get from hiring externally.
To achieve them, it’s important to champion a culture that rewards learning and self-improvement.
1. Becoming a Truly 21st Century Business
The 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey revealed that “building the 21st-century career” is an important trend in today’s workplace.
The report defines the 21st-century career as “a series of developmental experiences, each offering a person the opportunity to acquire new skills, perspectives, and judgment.”
Essentially, it’s about designing a program of continuous learning based on your team, resources, and workforce goals for the future.
The global workforce has officially shifted in favor of millennials. So you need to make sure that your business reflects and supports the drives of a younger workforce.
42% of people say that learning and development is the most important benefit they look out for in a new job.
If you can demonstrate that your business is committed to its people, you will look more attractive to up-and-coming talent.
2. Engage Your Stakeholders
Employees at all levels of the organization must understand the value of learning and take part in it. Encourage everyone to share their learning experiences to inspire others.
Your senior-level employees should be encouraged to participate. Rolling out culture changes from the top down is key to ensuring effective seeding and cultivation.
HR.com’s 2018 State of Engagement report is one of the most recent to identify ‘trust in leaders’ as the business trait most strongly connected to employee engagement. Employees place faith and trust in their leaders and look to them for permission as much as inspiration.
3. Communication is Key
It’s important to show your team that it’s okay to pursue personal development. Taking a hands-on, “practice what you preach” approach will reinforce the culture a hundred times more effectively than a paragraph in the employee handbook.
People will naturally look to you for leadership, so use that attention to reinforce the benefits of self-improvement. Spend time finding out what your staff wants to learn or achieve and work with them to figure out a way to align their goals and your business goals.
Continuous learning should never grow stagnant. There are always better ways to teach and better ways to learn.
Fortunately, communication is a two-way street, and you can survey employees about their experiences to gather relevant feedback. Actionable feedback will allow you to refine and improve your learning programs.
4. Futureproof Your Business
Whether it’s people getting hyped over blockchain, the drive for flexible working or process automation, the world is changing. And it’s changing fast.
What hasn’t changed is the necessity of businesses being ready to adapt to these new trends when needed. You can save yourself a lot of headaches by investing in your current employees to help them master the latest trends.
A Happy Workplace
Helping your people grow will help your business grow too. You strengthen employee loyalty, boost productivity, and create a happier workplace.
Businesses with a strong learning culture enjoy employee engagement and retention rates around 30-50% higher than those that don’t.
Investing in people provides proven benefits to your business, and ensuring effective investment starts with you.
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How Do You Foster Continuous Learning?
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I could not agree more. We need to start communicating with employees and creating a great place to work for the best productivity results.