What Kind of Learning Culture Does Your Company Have?

What type of true learning culture is your organization? Are you seeing a healthy return on your training investment? Would your entire organization adjust its training best practices and learning management system investments if you found out they didn’t align with your company’s culture of learning?

Senior leaders would more than likely make dramatic changes. Why? Training and development play a crucial role in empowering employees with new skills, new knowledge, and the adaptability needed to drive innovation, enhance performance, and deliver value to customers, ultimately contributing to business impact.

“The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.” - Josh Bersin, research analyst, speaker, and writer in areas of human resources, technology, learning, and leadership

There are at least four different kinds of successful learning cultures. What if the challenges you’re seeing in your training program have less to do with new technologies, people, and budgets, and more to do with a poor fit with your overall learning culture?

A lot would need to change, starting with how your company defines and approaches the concept of a learning culture.

Why Are There Different Kinds of Learning Cultures?

People learn in all sorts of ways—what clicks for one person might not work at all for someone else. We can categorize people as auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learners, or discover their DISC style of communicating and teach accordingly.

Differences in “learning style” are not just a matter of individual differences, but of corporate differences as well.

This makes sense if we think about the overall learning ecosystem. A learning ecosystem is defined not just by the people, content, and technology that exists in an organization, but also by the culture of learning that’s in place. And just as people have different learning styles, organizations have different learning cultures.

Many companies in the corporate training space talk as if learning cultures are merely good or bad, strong or weak. There’s a good reason for that: When there isn’t a strong learning culture in place, it’s because the organization is missing some important key elements. That doesn’t imply that all vibrant learning cultures are the same. Just as there are different ways in which individual learners learn, there is variation in the policies and attitudes that organizations take toward learning.

A learning organization sees the best results when they achieve a good fit among their culture of learning, the expectations of team members, training programs, technologies, and professional development opportunities.

For example, a true learning culture will:

• Address onboarding differently by prioritizing continuous learning from day one—and set the appropriate expectations to do so.
• Approach career development differently. Will learners be self-directed to learning resources and include training during their flow of work? Or does a chief learning officer directly schedule and control professional development? Again, each organization will need to set a clear vision.
• Thrive on the integration of diverse learning technologies, recognizing that different tools and platforms cater to varied learning needs and styles. Does your learning culture need to rely on training reinforcement? Social learning? Content curation? Self-directed learning? If you know your organization’s culture, you can know which technologies to prioritize.
• Embrace well-founded, comprehensive training solutions. Organizations will then begin to experience higher employee engagement and retention from team members.
• See an enhanced ROI on training investment, continuous improvement, and a growth mindset among employees.

The culture of learning can set the tone for corporate culture generally, so knowing which kind of learning culture you have can have effects that go well beyond training.

HSI Can Help

At HSI, we are here to help business leaders use eLearning tools to their advantage, leading to a positive learning experience along with a return on their investment. We’re here to help you transform your employee development program and build a strong learning culture. Request a consultation today.

Unlock Your Organization's Full Potential

Take the first step toward aligning your learning culture with your eLearning. Download our white paper, The Four Types of Learning Cultures, to understand the challenges of different learning styles in the workplace and how building a targeted micro-based, effective learning culture improves your ROI.

• In Addition, You’ll Learn:
  • The four types of learning cultures.
  • How to define your culture of learning.
  • What a difference the right “fit” makes in bringing learner expectations, training programs, and company culture into alignment.
  • How new technologies, including eLearning, work for each culture.
  • How to calculate your savings using online training.

Additional Resources

• HSI's Employee Training and Development Topics
• Benefits of Fostering a Growth Mindset Culture [+How to Begin]