A learning and developing culture can be cultivated with very little expense. And when employees are encouraged to learn, and recognised for doing so, there is an increase in motivation to develop and share. Ways in which you can foster this are:

• Identify latent talent, skills, experience in your employees and encourage them to build on these by utilising them where possible into the work they do for you.
• Encourage your employees to learn new skills that they can share with their team and the wider organisation:
  • Provide them with the time to learn – don’t expect them to do it in their own time
  • Actively help them find resources, mentors, experience
  • Coach them through the sharing of information, provide them with options if they balk at the concept of public speaking. Reiterate the value of the experience
  • If they leave,they were always going to leave. If they stay you have upskilled an employee who can take on more responsibility and will feel more loyalty to you and your company because you have invested time in them. 
• Hold lunch and learns. These are knowledge sharing events by who are or would like to be subject matter experts in your organisation.
  • Support your employee through their research and presentation
    • Follow up with them on how they found the experience
    • Be encouraging
  • Keep talks to around 10 to 20 mins and allow time for questions after
  • Consider them a part of the employees work day and make them optional not mandatory
  • Publicise the events. Record and distribute them throughout the company afterwards. 
  • Don’t hold just one. Give them time to build up.
  • Ensure they have structure and provide some boundaries on what the lunch and learns are for. This is a way for your people to grow, not learn hobbies
• Conferences are a great way to network, learn new skills, keep up to date with new ideas and advances in technology/methodology, and show you value your employees. If your business can’t afford sending an entire team, send one person and ask them to disseminate the information using lunch and learns, workshops, or creating a depository of documentation.
• Enable safaris. This is where an employee identifies an area of the business they are interested in and temporarily work in that area to get a feel for it. While providing a great growth opportunity for the employee and potentially encouraging a career change, it will also bring new ideas back to their existing team. Injecting fresh ways of looking at processes and improved ways of looking at their work.
• Reward innovative ideas to improve processes or products. Hackathons are a great way to do this and result in employees working and learning from each other from across the company. A bonus result is better processes within your company and improved products to offer your customers.

If you don’t have the resources to afford a learning and development department within your organisation, use the resources you do have existing already within your staff. Learning and development need not cost the earth, but at the same time, don’t expect all your learning and development needs to be satisfied in this way. You will need to spend some money at some stage, but make sure you get the maximum from this financial outlay.

If you would like some ideas on how else you could encourage a learning culture within your organisation, feel free to reach out and I will provide you with some guidance.

©Fiona Doney 2024