Are you a Learning Organisation?

Creating a learning organisation demands that we create a psychologically safe environment, in that sense, learning and innovation are one in the same.

The most innovative companies, where continuously up-skilling happens ‘naturally’, are full of people who feel safe and feel like they belong. They are workplaces where nobody is afraid to say they messed up, or to try something new.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of organisations today talk the talk about ‘failing fast’ and ‘experimenting’… but they aren't walking the walk.

• Today more than ever, companies need to maximize their human capital by providing the right skills at the right time for the right people.
• Embracing the right level of training, enablement and engagement can dramatically reduce attrition and safeguard the investment made in hiring.
• Do senior management inside organizations have a clear idea that skills matter.
• Can they show they are getting a Return On Investment (ROI) for Safety Training.

Top performing companies not only recognize the importance of their people but also the need to provide the right skills to enable their people to excel.

Perceptions of new employee training by job level

• It is clear senior management teams who are successful recognize need for skills & training.
• But often there is disconnect however between what the senior management believe is being delivered and what is actually being delivered.

Working with the management team to bridge the gap

Training Providers have the ability to work with Clients to address all the needs of the senior management team and client HR teams.

• Linking training to business needs
• One stop shop not limited to just, offering other IT technology training, project management and other related training
• Skills gap analysis
• Driving training effectiveness metrics and performance
• Hosting Learning Management Systems and integration into existing

Building skills for a smarter workforce It pays to work smarter not harder and these approaches to how work gets done fall into three main categories which make their organizations more:

1. Dynamic — adjusting rapidly to changing business conditions
2. Collaborative — bringing together resources, both internal and external, to share insights and solve problems
3. Connected — enabling access to information regardless of time, distance or organizational silos

Employees who do not feel they can achieve career goals at their current organization are 12 times more likely to consider leaving than employees who do feel they can achieve their career goals - Even worse, it skyrockets about 30 times for new employees

Best practices from leading organizations

Leading organizations adopt the following best practices to create a culture that fosters continuous learning — practices that lead to better and faster business results:

• Fully training the team as the most important factor in reducing the effect of knowledge leak is fully training everyone
• Provide ongoing training / access to reference resources.
• The obvious method to reduce leakage is to provide “refresher training” continuously
• Doccumented processes or routines can mitigate the absence of individual skill.
• Train consistently.
• Training new hires, promotions and transfers, regardless of their “source,” is important to ensure consistent application of policy and ultimate system success
• Train efficiently. The acclimation of new users is exacerbated when positions turn over quickly, as in the case where residents temporarily work as part of their organizations in urban areas where turnover is higher than rural locations.
• Train globally. Training on a global basis is a never-ending cycle.
• Train conveniently. Technology-based training, including informal or search learning, supports delivery as closely as possible to the time when employees will use the new system or new procedure, ensuring the most value of the training and the most value of the system.
• Explain thoroughly. Users may not always have access to mentors and may need access to reference material, search tools or expanded training to address areas of need whenever problems arise.

Align your learning strategy with the business

Be proactive in understanding and supporting both tactical and strategic goals. Top companies are driven more by business priorities than others and involve business leaders directly they:

1. Analyze the business problem before recommending a solution
2. Work with senior managers to identify specific business metrics to be improved
3. Recognize that learning is aligned with the overall business plan
4. Demonstrate value back to the business by revisiting objectives with senior managers and reporting on the goals/results

Leverage the experience and results of others

• Top learning companies are more likely to invest in the process of benchmarking to help avoid re-inventing the wheel to continually improve performance.
• External comparisons also help to justify the business case.

Position yourself for success

Timing is everything - Understand learner behavior upfront to accelerate change and link to other initiatives in the organizations to make it relevant — do not teach people to shovel snow in the summer

The need for you to measure your ROI

To measure the value of training, you must set objectives and then isolate the impact training has on achieving those objectives as you will need to determine a value in units for each area of improvement and how it will have an associated business value in wages and sales.

Here are a few recommendations:

1. Test before and after: Perform a test to measure knowledge and job satisfaction before the training event, then test afterwards to compare the results.

2. Examine your service metrics: Measure the impact to customer service, tech support and compliance before and after. Determine a value in units.

3. Measure sales performance: How does a skilled workforce, from administrators and engineers to web developers, affect your sales by producing a better experience for customers?

 If you are providing safety training, measure the change in safety for trained employees and in addition, measure the amount of time spent looking for information by administering a questionnaire before and after the training event.

4. Examine time to completion: How long do you estimate it will take to complete a project as you will have to quantify the value of the difference between the completion rate for trained employees versus untrained employees. Salaries are one measurement; opportunity is another.  If you are producing a product for a client, what is the value in completing the project 10% faster?

5. Examine costs: Training reduces waste of valuable assets.

For example, employees who are trained to use a shared cloud hosting service for data will dramatically decrease the amount of storage needed overall in the organization. What is the value achieved from asset reduction?

The benefits you attain — and the training costs to achieve them — should be measured over a 12-month period to provide a realistic value of improvement.

The value of technology is realised through its implementation and that implementation requires people who are effectively trained with the necessary skills to make the best possible use of information technology solutions.