Have you considered the true value of implementing more learning in your organisation? 

Despite the obvious shorter-term gains, such as increased engagement, motivation, and innovation, there are also longer-term benefits.

Creating a culture of learning in your organisation is about fostering your employees' intrinsic drive to learn and supporting them on this journey of development and discovery. 

In doing so, they can become self-motivated to continually develop new skills and knowledge and update their existing expertise. This not only benefits their career progression but also the entire organisation as a whole.

The benefits of implementing a learning culture 

Firstly, it improves employee morale and motivation. Employees respond well and are better engaged when they feel that their organisation is investing in them. 

Building a learning culture shows employees that they are valued.

It also saves on new hires by “promoting” from within. We’ve all heard the statistic that it costs well over three times more to hire a new employee than to retain and train an existing one. So when new skills are needed, what’s the most cost-effective way to get them? Train, promote, and deploy from within.

Learning helps challenge rigid opinions and behaviours. 

Challenging rigid thinking and behaviours improves team performance even as it reduces close-mindedness and “silo” thinking.

It also instils a “growth mindset” in your employees. 

Dr. Carol Dweck, a research psychologist at Stanford University, found that individuals with a “growth mindset”—people who enjoy challenges, strive to learn, and uncover ways to develop new skills—develop more skills, work harder, perform better, and adapt to change better than those with a “fixed” mindset.

Learning gives your organisation a “growth mindset” too. 

Dweck’s work has been extended and shown to apply to entire organisations as well. Organisations with a growth mindset have more employees who feel valued, less politics and cheating, and more innovation.

Learning prepares the organisation, as a whole, for change. 

A proper learning culture emphasises asking questions, observing, and continually acquiring new skills. When a critical mass of employees can do this, the company as a whole can adapt to change, anticipate disruption, and innovate. Those that don’t… well, notice what happened to Kodak, Blockbuster, Yahoo!, etc…

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Calculating ROI

The long-term ROI can be huge.

Take all of these together, and we would expect an organisation with a true learning culture to adapt to change more easily, innovate more, reduce employee turnover, promote the right people to leadership positions more rapidly, and generally be more productive. 

While most of these might be hard to measure on a day-to-day basis, they are on every CEO’s list of things that they want for their company. And with good reason: they are all the hallmarks of a successful, long-lasting, and profitable company. 

Given how easy it is to put a learning culture in place and how long the benefits last, it’s easy to see the potential impact on ROI. 

The Learning and Development Academy advises this calculation:

Learning ROI (%) = (Gain from Learning - Cost of Learning)/Cost of Learning x 100

“One of the best ways to tackle this challenge is to determine in advance what output (in terms of performance, time, productivity, etc.) is expected to be directly related to the learning initiative. Practically, this can be measured by setting up control groups – one group goes through the training, and the other – does not. Then the changes in their performance are measured, and this becomes the tangible return on investment”

A true learning culture benefits greatly, with efficiency gains, increased productivity, profit, and decreased employee turnover, as employee satisfaction levels rise and loyalty and commitment increase.

Get in touch with us at Synaptic Potential to find out how you can unlock the potential of your people by creating a market-leading learning culture.

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