To build a positive, effective learning culture in organisations, you need to understand the level of involvement that managers and employees feel they have in organisational learning.
As suggested in Towards Maturity’s Annual Research Report, enabling employees and managers to take more ownership of workplace learning can change your company’s L&D function from one of mere learning delivery to, instead, a role of enablement and empowerment.
‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ - Benjamin Franklin
Even if you think it has, it’s worth double-checking. A good starting point – and in keeping with this approach of employee involvement – is carrying out a culture assessment among your employees. Find out how they perceive the learning culture in your workplace; don’t simply assume that their perceptions will match your understanding of the status quo. Discover what knowledge and skills, what performance improvement, they feel they’ve gained from their learning at work. See if your company really has developed a learning culture that’s rewarding each employee and ultimately, the whole organisation.
We’ve got just the tool for you to do this: 20 questions for your employees. This is a simple, practical and powerful approach to assessing learning culture – since, as Stephen Gill from 'Learning to be Great' puts it, asking questions is ‘the routine activity’ of an organisation that supports learning. You could distribute these questions among your employees as an anonymous survey, and then use the results to form an interesting and insightful report. If you’d like granularity in the results, you could change the questions to statements with graded responses – for example:
Strongly agree |
Agree
|
Neither agree O |
Disagree
|
Strongly disagree
|
Your employees’ responses will reveal how they perceive your organisation’s philosophy and practice of learning. Their answers will also shed light on their personal attitudes towards learning. You’ll see how successful your organisation’s learning values and strategies are, and how you can improve these, where necessary – for instance, using online learning to close skills gaps, making greater use of social learning, or transforming your LMS. You’ll be able to plot the steps to align your employees’ perceptions, motivations and actual learning activities; your senior leaders’ best practice in communicating and carrying out learning; and your organisation’s desired learning culture.
As you equip yourself with your colleagues’ responses to these questions, you can be satisfied that you’re spearheading the dialogue, cooperation and openness to change that are at the heart of a thriving learning culture.
Read our article on learning culture for help with practical ways to transform a learning culture into a key driver of business success.