How’s your learning culture looking (and sounding, and feeling…)?
Naturally, the first place to start when it comes to creating a learning culture is to take stock of where you are now with an audit.
You may be thinking ‘But we don’t have a learning culture - there’s nothing to audit!’... but that’s not strictly true. Whether you know about it or not, learning happens every minute of every day at your organisation, and now is the time to find out more about it.
Whether you’re just starting out or are already working on your learning culture, check out the five steps you should follow to conduct your learning culture audit.
While it may be tricky to fully formalise your audit, it’s still important to develop a set of criteria against which your existing (and future) culture can be measured. That could include leadership commitment, opportunities for skill development, employee engagement in learning and ease of accessing learning content.
What are the current procedures and practices in place? Are there lots of hoops employees need to jump through to engage in learning? Who has access to which content? What do managers do to encourage learning? What self-directed learning exists outside formal training workshops? Understanding the current state of play will help you identify gaps, challenges and unnecessary barriers to learning.
Of course, it’s vital that you hear directly from your employees about their experience of learning at your company. In your survey, you could ask if employees know what content is available, their thoughts on the quality, what’s missing, what they like and what they don’t like. Crucially, don’t miss out on the opportunity to ask whether or not people understand how the available learning ties into the overall business goals - if they even know what those goals are!
Take the time to hold conversations about your learning with key stakeholders, including the leadership team, managers and employees. This will help you dig deeper into the way people learn and share knowledge. You could even ask people to show you how they would find job-critical information to give you an insight into how people really navigate your learning platform and access your resources.
Finally, the fun part! Take a look at how your data relates to your original criteria. Is your leadership team on board with your learning? Do managers understand their role in driving employee development? Are employees engaging, and if not, why not? Do people know what content exists, and if so, do they know the fastest way to find it? This will then enable you to understand your current learning culture and report back to the business on what’s working, what isn’t and what’s going to change.
The word 'audit' can strike fear into the heart of even the most experienced L&D professional. It's probably not your favourite task, as it's usually a hugely manual, tedious, never-ending process.
If this sounds familiar, we've got some great news for you! Our new learning maturity healthcheck quiz is the quickest, easiest way to discover how your current learning culture is performing. In just three minutes, you can find out how your learning culture stacks up, and how you can reach the next level.