The HR Professionals of today are struggling to build a culture of coaching, feedback, development, and mentorship for their Employees. Given the fact that more than half the workforce is now made up of Millennials, it is essential that your organisation provides them with the thing that they ask for most, which is, someone to learn from. This approach has been described as the 'Self Developing Organisation.' That is, an organisation that has the capacity, the technology and the operational agility to develop, train and empower on the fly. With the rise of the need for real-time learning and empowerment on the rise, rather than think about your learning and HR strategy as one of 'delivering training,' think about it as 'building a self-developing organisation.'
Your Employees Want (and Need) To Learn, But How Do You Meet Their Needs?
The 2016 Human Capital Trends report from Deloitte makes it clear that the pressure on organisations to improve learning and development will continue to intensify. The work of work continues to change as such a rapid rate, it creates an environement where employees need to be ingaged in a process of continual learning in order to be able to keep up with the rate of change. Deloitte's report illustrates how advances in technology, shifts in demographics, and the constant competitive necessity to upgrade workforce skills are disrupting corporate learning. Organisations are being called on to develop new ways to put employees in charge of their own learning experience and foster a culture of learning.
The key learning takeaways from Deloitte's response pool of 7,000 business and HR leaders can be summarised as follows:
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More than eight in ten executives (84 percent) in this year’s survey view learning as an important (40 percent) or very important (44 percent) issue.
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Employees at all levels expect dynamic, self-directed, continuous learning opportunities from their employers.
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Despite the strong shift toward employee-centric learning, many learning and development organizations are still struggling with internally focused and outdated platforms and static learning approaches.
Enter, The Self-Developing Organisation
According to Josh Bersin, a 'Self-Developing Organisation' does the following:
- Ensure that education and learning content is readily available to anyone, and it’s easy to find and use.
- Developes teams where people make time to teach and coach others, and they are rewarded for it.
- The company stops and investigates its mistakes, making sure teams learn from failures.
- Formal learning programs are easy to access and highly regarded, so people regularly use them.
- Leaders at all levels teach classes and workshops (professional, technical, and senior executives).
- Onboarding is a serious and formal effort, with a focus on making people productive regardless of where they come from.
- Every job has a transition management program to help people learn the job from internal transfer.
- Learning technology is modern, easy to use, and fun.
- Individuals are rewarded for self-development.
- Books, magazines, and other external research is readily available.
- People are hired for their 'learning agility' and ability to teach themselves.
- Learning is valued as part of the culture, and remains in place during good times and bad.
With all the hype around LMS and cloud e-learning in the market (LinkedIn's acquisition of Lynda) and in the workplace, it would be wise for HR Professionals to pause for a moment and ponder how your business could transition into a 'self-developing organisation.' The next question becomes; 'how do you put systems and processes in place to make a transition to being that type of organisation.'
If your business hasn't yet started down this path, and you're still trying to push learning and development on your people, perhaps now is the time to take that pause. Rather than focus on structured learning and measuring the learning in your organisation to prove its output, perhaps it's time to reconsider how you make learning available, easy, and part of your culture. At the end of the day, self-developing organisations are set to out-perform and out-deliver their peers, and it is essential to get on board now and provide your Employees with the capacity to be in a continually evolving environment where learning and self-development are upheld as essential characteristics for building your culture.
