In this episode, we discuss building a learning culture.
There’s been an ongoing conversation and focus on the ‘learning culture’ of an organization for at least the past decade, and there are many articles over that time which talk about the connection between a culture that supports individual learners’ interest in learning and connects it with the mission and goals of the organization. And over the past few years, we’re seen some statistics which suggest a learning culture is at least correlated with business performance. A study released by Deloitte, for instance, found that companies with a strong learning culture – or in other words, high-performing learning organizations – are 58% more likely to be prepared to meet future demand, have 37% greater employee productivity, and are 92% more likely to innovate, compared with other companies.
This episode looks at building a learning culture through the experience and guidance of Rachel Horwitz, the global director of learning and development at Convatec.
Listen to the podcast here, and continue reading about this topic below.
Rachel describes how she and her team implemented a strategy to support a learning culture in the organization, structed around four pillars:
- Senior Leadership Partnership, Buy-In and Sponsorship: “I wanted them to know what I was doing, but I also wanted to leverage their expertise.,” said Horwitz. ” Senior leaders love to teach and love to get involved… I wanted to leverage their expertise.”
- Curriculum: Horwitz said this focuses on, “how are we going to build learning initiatives, learning experiences, that help to build the capabilities we identified with senior leaders. That’s where the Content Library came from. I also brought in instructional designers, so that if the off-the-shelf content didn’t make sense and didn’t meet our needs, we could build some customized content to fill those gaps and streamline the curriculum.”
- Learning Operations: “We had a learning management system and had some processes in place,” said Horwitz, “but we had to create [more complete] learning processes, learning standards, and governance; [so] our stakeholders knew how to get to us and what that partnership looked like when they met with us.”
- Learning Measurement: Horwitz said her team was also structured to answer key questions: “How do we measure all of this to make sure we’re impactful?,” she said. “I hired
somebody focused on learning analytics so we could measure the curriculum, measure capability building, measure the basic parts of learning analytics out of the operations.”