Issue #2: What causes Learning Culture to fail
It's the thing that organisations want most when it comes to L&D but why does it rarely happen?
Editors Foreword
Here’s a little welcome message to the second issue of LD MENA.
Featured Article - 5 practices for growing a learning culture
Creating a robust learning culture within an organisation is essential for fostering innovation, engagement, and overall productivity. Despite its importance, many organisations struggle to establish such cultures. This article explores the reasons behind the scarcity of learning cultures, how L&D teams typically address these challenges, and actionable strategies to cultivate a thriving learning environment.
Why Learning Cultures Often Don’t Exist
Lack of Understanding: Many organisations do not fully grasp what a learning culture entails. Misconceptions about its definition and scope can lead to superficial efforts that fail to engage employees meaningfully.
Bureaucratic Barriers: Organisational processes and hierarchies can inhibit knowledge sharing and collaboration. This creates silos where learning is not prioritised, limiting opportunities for informal and social learning.
Engagement Issues: Busy managers and employees often prioritise immediate tasks over learning, leading to a culture where development is not seen as a critical component of work life.
Resource Constraints: Organisations may perceive the investment in creating a learning culture as costly or unnecessary, especially if immediate returns are not evident.
Resistance to Change: Some leaders may be resistant to shifting their focus from traditional performance metrics to those that include learning and development outcomes.
Strategies to Drive a Learning Culture
To effectively cultivate a learning culture, organisations must implement strategies that resonate with employees and meet their needs. Here are expanded tips based on the key strategies for driving a learning culture:
Give Them What They Need, Not Just What the Business Thinks They Want
Understanding learners' actual needs is crucial. This requires L&D teams to actively listen to their audience and gather insights through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. By identifying skills gaps and career aspirations, organisations can tailor relevant and impactful learning opportunities.
Conduct Needs Assessments: Don’t just create what the C-Suite thinks its people need. Regularly assess the skills and knowledge employees require to perform their roles effectively and to advance in their careers. This will then give you a clearer understand as to what they actually want.
Personalise Learning Paths: Create segmented learning experiences that align with organisational goals and personal career needs. Ensure employees are aware of these and clearly understand how they will benefit from them. For example, you have numerous employees who aspire to be a manager. Curate a course playlist called ‘Manger 101’ for aspiring managers, which can be assigned to them during performance reviews or shown on internal career mobility sites.
Involve Employees in the Process: Encourage employees to contribute to the learning programs through feedback. You can also conduct user-generated content initiatives to produce contextual learning pieces using internal subject matter experts.
Make It Easier to Consume
Redesigning content to enhance the learning experience is essential for engagement. This includes simplifying access to materials and ensuring that learning resources are user-friendly.
Utilise Microlearning: Break down content into smaller, digestible modules that can be consumed quickly, allowing employees to learn at their own pace without feeling overwhelmed. Also, make these easy to locate so your learners can easily revisit them and get the answers to their questions effectively.
Create Engaging Formats: To move away from passive learning experiences, use a variety of formats—videos, infographics, podcasts, and interactive screens.
Streamline Access: To minimise the barriers to engagement, ensure that learning resources are easily accessible through learning platforms and viable communication tools, such as MS Teams.
Design for Where Your Audience Is
Understanding your employees' digital landscape is vital. This means recognising how they access information and tailoring learning resources accordingly.
Mobile-Friendly Learning: Develop content that is optimised for both mobile devices and desktops, allowing employees to learn on the go and at their convenience. Use a responsive authoring tool such as Articulate Rise or IsEazy to make the content easily accessed on any device.
Leverage Social Media: Utilise internal social platforms where employees are already active to share learning content and foster discussions, making learning a part of their everyday interactions. These can include MS Teams, Yammer and your Intranet.
Integrate with Existing Tools: Ensure that learning resources are integrated into tools and platforms that employees already use, such as your LMS/LXP, collaboration software or project management tools. By making it easy for learners to find and access the learning resource they need, when they need it, you are making it far more likely that this can become a habit fo them.
Emulate How We Stream in Our Daily Lives
The way people consume content in their personal lives can inform how learning materials are presented. By curating content that is relevant and meaningful, organisations can enhance engagement.
Curated Learning Experiences: Develop curated playlists of learning resources that align with specific topics or skills, similar to how streaming services offer themed collections. For example, New Starter playlist with FAQs, induction material and helpful resources for their first few months.
On-Demand Learning: Provide access to learning materials that employees can engage with whenever they choose, mirroring the convenience of streaming content.
Utilise Recommendations: Implement algorithms or systems that suggest learning resources based on employees' previous interactions, creating a personalised learning journey. This can also be specific to particular groups of people e.g. New Managers, Staff applying for internal jobs etc.
What’s in it for them
Marketing learning initiatives effectively is essential to ensure employees understand the benefits of participation (WIIFM – What’s in it for me). This involves clearly communicating how learning opportunities will enhance their skills and career prospects, rather than focusing on just giving details of what the solution is, e.g. We have 10,000 courses available (This doesn’t tell people what is in it for them; it just sounds like a stat). Marketing our learning is not a one-off but a continuous effort throughout the year to keep learning front of mind, and its benefits are clearly understood through effective campaigns.
Highlight Career Advancement: Emphasise how participation in learning programs can lead to promotions, new responsibilities, or skill enhancement, making the value proposition clear.
Showcase Success Stories: Share testimonials and case studies from employees who have benefited from learning initiatives, illustrating real-world applications and outcomes.
Make it relevant: Understand what is important to your people and target your campaigns to them. Have a group of new managers? Create a Top 10 tips article on how to be a better manager with links to a related course playlist you created.
Final thoughts
If there is an overarching piece of advice that I can give, it is this: If you can focus on providing contextual resources that align with your people’s needs and are easy to access, then you are surely on the right path to growing a positive learning culture.
- John Hinchliffe
Editor & Founder, LD MENA
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The Global Sentiment Survey 2024
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12 Reasons Your Digital Transformation Will Fail
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Discover how Wagamama revolutionized its employee training by partnering with LearnWorlds to create the Wagamama Zone, an innovative online training academy. Faced with the challenge of standardizing training across over 190 locations and a tight deadline due to the failure of their previous LMS, Wagamama implemented a user-friendly solution that not only streamlined onboarding but also significantly reduced training costs.
M.E. and L&D
In each issue, we delve into the inspiring journeys of trailblazers in the L&D sector across the MENA region, uncovering their unique insights, their origin stories and innovative approaches that have helped them in their careers to hopefully inspire your own journey.
For this issue, we are thankful to have Senior Learning & Development Professional and Content Creator Liza Stus.
In this interview, we explore the moments that have moved her career to the point it is now and get her take on how she creates memorable learning experiences. For me, what makes Liza so unique is not only that she is a great Senior L&D Professional but also that she puts so much time and energy into creating insightful videos on YouTube to help new and aspiring L&D peers, which is really commendable.
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Thanks for joining us for this issue of LD MENA!
- John Hinchliffe
Thanks for sharing this informative issue @John.
Bureaucratic Barriers are more dangerous then any other barriers to develop the learning culture.