Learning and The Employee Experience

Learning – Core to the Employee Experience

Learning is a fundamental motivator in our career and life.? It activates the mind and provides a source of inspiration for us to pursue continuous growth, improvement, and change.? The act of learning something new is a purposeful step in the direction of personal evolution – a commitment to growth and engagement.? When we are learning, we are living.? As author of Pearls of Wisdom, Lailah Gifty, puts it, “Read {learn} daily to renew your mind.”?

The opposite, however, also holds true.?When people cease to learn, they stagnate and wither away.? Just as our bodies need physical activity to thrive and stay healthy, so to do our minds and intellects.? Individuals, teams, societies, and cultures that deprioritize and misunderstand learning pay a high cost down the road.? They ultimately and inevitably lose their competitiveness, innovation, drive, and intrinsic motivation for continuous improvement.? Short term gains at the expense of long-term learning are mistaken choices guided by a flawed set of decision – making factors and variables.? Unfortunately, however, it is all too often the dominant logic of how we treat learning and development within our organizations and institutions.

There is reason to be optimistic however.? These days, leading organizations around the world are spending their time, energy and capital rethinking the employee experience they create for their people.? From benefits to well-being to compensation to the physical and digital workspace, there has been an awakening across industries that the experience people have at work every day matters a lot to the culture, performance, innovation, and mission of the organization.? In a recent HBR article on employee experience, Marcus Buckingham writes that all the efforts a company makes in lifelong learning "...communicate explicitly that the employee's growth and development have intrinsic worth, even if it doesn't immediately accrue to the organization." That’s why it's so important to carefully and intentionally design the right employee experience – one that creates forward movement, drives positive outcomes, builds a sustainable culture, and ultimately supports the mission and purpose of the organization.? Learning and development can and should be core components of the design of this new employee experience.

It hasn't always been that way though. In fact, for many of us that have been in the learning and development industry for a while, it has frequently been a struggle to get our stakeholders to pay attention and take us seriously. Over the years, learning has been an under-leveraged factor in creating this positive and differentiated employee experience.? This is not to suggest that organizations have neglected to drive learning and development into their strategies.? High performing organizations have been building learning into the way they do business for several decades.? But the power of an intentionally designed people experience that takes advantage of the full power of learning on retention, engagement, and performance has yet to be fully explored.? It’s a new frontier in the exploration and development of a highly differentiated people experience – new opportunity for growth, change, and evolution.? Additionally, its a low cost, high impact tool to positively shape the unique way each individual contributes to the mission and purpose of the organization.? This focus on purpose can create deep engagement and commitment – personal investment.

If learning is such an important driver of outcomes and engagement, why doesn’t it play a larger role in the design of the optimal employee experience?? Why has it been under-leveraged for so long?? My personal view on this is that it boils down to time and psychology. ?Even though we have adapted over time to embed learning into the flow of work and make it more efficient, it still takes time and space to engage in deep learning.? And in today’s fast paced environment with short term objectives driving much of our behavior and choices, learning is often the easy target to be sacrificed for the more immediate needs of now.?? Psychologically speaking, the urgent can easily take over and erase out the things that we want and need to do for a sustainable and better future.? This isn’t the case at Moderna – where we are deliberately emphasizing the connection between learning and our people experience, making it core to our decisions and the way we envision the next 20 years. We are working hard to build a fundamentally different company that our children will want to work for.

One of the 12 Moderna mindsets is to ‘obsess over learning.’? An obsession with learning comes inherently with a strong commitment.? In a previous post, I suggested that the strongest learning cultures are those that are guided by deep belief in the power of continuous growth – not by a relentless quest for immediate ROI.? Moderna has this underlying belief and understands that through upskilling, leadership development, and continuous learning, we will create the best version of this company for the future and subsequently impact the lives of our many patients around the world.? From this perspective then, learning becomes part of the path to achieving our essential purpose and mission in the world. That’s what gets me - and my Moderna colleagues- up every morning.

Learning is our fuel for culture, growth and performance.? But, like anything, it doesn’t come free.? Without deep commitment, proper resourcing, and visible leadership role modeling, learning can never fulfill its full potential as a core part of the people experience.? I’m glad to be a part of a culture that implicitly understands this and wants to design its people experience to fully leverage the exponential power of learning and development.??More to come.