Build a Strong Learning Culture on Your Team 26/10/23, 10:43 AM

Talent Management

Build a Strong Learning

Culture on Your Team
by James McKenna

June 06, 2023

pchyburrs/Getty Images

Summary. With the nature of work changing so rapidly, it’s no longer enough just
to offer employees opportunities for upskilling and reskilling. Companies also need
to help workers become “expert learners” — and a key way of doing that, the
learning-and-development expert James McKenna writes, is to follow the

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principles of the Universal Design Framework for learning, or UDL. In this article,
McKenna lays out some of those principles and offers advice to companies who
want to make it possible for their employees to become expert learners. close

When Kendra Grant’s team was charged with designing and

delivering learning experiences for 90,000 Walmart Canada
associates, she knew as a senior learning-and-design director that
the landscape of corporate learning needs was constantly
changing. “Over time,” says Grant, now the principal of her own
L&D practice, “we acknowledged that many of the problems we
saw, such as lack of engagement and lack of retention, were a
result of the design process and not the fault of the learners.”

If you are in a leadership role in your organization, you more than

likely share this problem. Technology and society are driving
changes faster than your people can adapt. According to the
OECD, 1.1 billion jobs will be disrupted in the next five years.
Employees the world over require upskilling (learning to improve
current work) and reskilling (learning to do new types of work).
Some organizations are heeding the signs and investing heavily in
learning and development: Walmart, for example, is investing $1
billion into reskilling its workforce, and McDonald’s has spent
$165 million over the past eight years to prepare 72,000
employees for upward mobility. The Association for Talent
Development’s most recent study found the average organization
spends almost $1,300 per employee on professional learning.
Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, exhorts everyone to be a “learn-it-
all.”

Workers of today need to prepare for what they’ll be doing

tomorrow. But how can they adapt effectively if their work is
changing in real time? What skills can they learn now that will

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support them in the face of a volatile and ambiguous future? And

how can their employers support them?

There’s a simple but not easy answer to all of these questions.

Employers have to help employees become expert learners —
people with the will to learn, the skill to do it effectively, and the
ability to apply that learning in ways that positively impact their
performance and that of their teams.

Still Wearing Blinders

Traditionally, learning within organizations has been driven by a
single department. In a general attempt to motivate and support
employee development, the learning-and-development team —
which sometimes consists of just one person — acts as an order
filler for operations managers and leadership, providing formal
learning support, such as classroom training and online modules.
Frequently, these efforts are augmented by tuition assistance for
degree and certificate programs at institutes of higher education.
In recent years, companies have created digital “learning-
management systems” or “learning-experience platforms” that
offer a Netflix-style menu of learning content that employees can
access on-demand and at their own pace.

Unfortunately, however, these approaches to employee learning

are not up today’s challenge, for a few reasons:

A day late and a dollar short. Content creation lags significantly

behind the need for that content, making the content available
less relevant to current needs. Also, when an employee needs new
knowledge and skills now, a course next month isn’t helpful.

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One-size-fits-none. Every learner is unique, with varied

strengths, experiences, and challenges. Every learner works in
different contexts, thus requiring greater personalization to
support meaningful learning and improvement.

A lack of support for application. Pushing out content can

impart new information, but developing effective skills requires
coaching, reinforcement, and opportunities for safe, authentic
practice.

A cultural disconnect. Leaders can say they value learning, but

according to Deloitte, workers actually have less than 1% of their
time available for learning. Further, learning can be messy,
because it requires that people try new things and make mistakes.
If an organization punishes people for those mistakes, as some do,
people will shy away from learning.

Learner experience and identity. Not everyone thinks of

themselves as a lifelong learner, nor do they all have the skills to
learn and apply learning effectively. Further, biases in
development programs may reinforce the notion that only some
people are capable of learning and therefore worth the
investment. This bias is communicated to workers.

There Is a Solution
We need to address these barriers to learning in order to meet the
challenges of today and the future. Learning, after all, is what
enables people to adapt to change and even become drivers of
change. But, as Matthew Daniel has recently noted on the Chief
Learning Officer website, even if people want to learn they may
not know what to learn — or how to learn.

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Expert learning requires two key conditions. The first is context.

People need the time and space to learn. They need timely,
actionable feedback; opportunities for collaboration; and just-in-
time support to convert new knowledge and skills into
measurable performance improvement. Then there’s capacity.
Each person has talents, strengths, interests, challenges, and
experiences that influence how they engage with, make sense of,
and apply new knowledge and skills. We can’t assume everyone
has developed the requisite learning skills and behaviors, and we
can’t effectively gauge learning capacity in advance. However, we
can help all people become expert learners, by providing them
with options to learn and apply key learning behaviors rooted in a
framework known as the Universal Design for Learning.

UDL, as it’s often called, was first devised in the 1990s by

researchers and clinicians at the nonprofit learning organization
CAST, Inc., under the direction of the neuropsychologist David
Rose, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a co-
founder, Anne Meyer. Today it’s endorsed in federal education
legislation as a means for supporting inclusive, impactful
learning for all learners. That includes workforce preparation and
training. In essence, UDL helps us embrace the differences
between learners — their variability in strengths, interests,
attitudes, cultures, and more — by setting firm, challenging goals
and allowing for flexible pathways to meet those goals.

When employing UDL in creating learning experiences, you’re

encouraged to think of learning as a set of behaviors and skills
that exist on a continuum from novice to expert. Novice learning
is primarily guided by external forces: Novices learn what they’re
told, when they’re told, for the reasons given to them. They are
the type of learners whom top-down, one-size-fits-all training was

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meant to serve. A distinct step above the novice level is self-

directed learning, where learners take the initiative for their own
learning, making decisions about what, when, and how to learn.

Expert learning takes things to another level, by adding in specific

learning skills and a focus on strategic performance
improvement. Expert learners have the will and skill to learn, can
identify ways to leverage that learning into impact, and are
always looking for new challenges and ways to improve their
skills. They are the learners best able to adapt to the rapidly
changing modern workplace.

How Expert Learners Improve Outcomes

Building a strong learning culture that focuses on capacity and
context can give companies a strategic advantage. Let’s consider
why.

First, employees who are skilled learners can more readily

innovate, for what is innovation if not the learning how to solve a
problem in a new way? A person focused on continuous
improvement rarely settles for “We’ve always done it this way.”
Expert learners can identify emerging knowledge and skill needs
and generate new knowledge to meet those needs.

Next, learning fuels employee engagement. Employer-supported

learning is a key driver of retention, particularly when learning is
visibly linked to employee development — that is, upward
mobility. Creating a culture that supports people to learn and own
their improvement makes improvement a common cause
between the employees and the organization. Further, a visible

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emphasis on learning can be key to attracting new talent, with

Gen Z and Millennial workers citing learning and upward
mobility as key motivators in selecting job opportunities.

Finally, investing in learning is just that: an investment.

According to Gallup, companies that invest in employee
development increase profitability by 11%.

Building a Culture of Expert Learners

Building a culture of expert learning is a complex undertaking.
There are, however, some foundational practices, aligned with
UDL, that leaders and teams can engage in as they work to
develop support an expert learning culture.

Adopt a learning philosophy and stick to it.

A learning philosophy is a codification of what the organization

believes about learning, including its value, the responsibilities of
each person related to learning, and the methods by which the
organization will support its employees to learn and improve.

Consider the philosophy of the United States Marine Corps, where

learning is literally a survival skill. In 2020, the USMC published
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7: Learning, or the MCDP 7,
which tells all Marines, from the lowest-ranking enlisted member
to the commandant, that they have a professional responsibility
to learn. It also lays out the necessary conditions for learning,
requiring each Marine to contribute to and leverage those
conditions. All Marines are told they can’t rely on a training
department of some sort but instead have to define and own their
roles as learners. “Continuous learning is essential,” USMC
Commandant Gen. D.H. Berger writes in the MCDP-7, “… because

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it enables Marines to quickly recognize changing conditions in

the battlespace, adapt, and make timely decisions against a
thinking enemy.”

Audit your culture for barriers to learning.

With your learning philosophy in place, make sure the collective

behaviors, practices, and systems of your organization — and
particularly the behaviors of your leaders — model and support
the tenets of that philosophy. Examine what learning currently
looks like in your organization and begin addressing common
barriers. Provide time and resources for learning and regularly
reinforcing the value of learning. Incentivize experimentation,
collaboration, and knowledge-sharing. Promote team learning
over individual knowledge-hoarding. Link learning to
development by creating clear pathways for skill development
and promotion. And enlist frontline employees and managers to
more quickly identify learning needs and potential solutions.

Be flexible.

To act like expert learners, particularly in selecting and

strategically applying learning, people need flexibility in when
and how they learn. New approaches, such as Learning-Cluster
Design and the Modern Learning Ecosystem framework,
acknowledge variability among learners, providing them options
that best suit their learning needs, and close the gap between
formal learning and where learning happens most — on the job.

***

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Change is constant, and the need for adaptability extends beyond

leaders to every level of the organization. When employees own
their improvement, they can better anticipate, communicate, and
meet their upskilling and reskilling needs. As Kendra Grant
pointed out in describing her work with Walmart, many barriers
to improvement that are thought to be internal to learners are
really external — they’re flaws in the design. UDL helps us focus
on what works for people rather than on what’s not working in
them. By providing the right context and supporting capacity, we
can make expert learning become the skill that fills the skills gap.

JM
James McKenna is an award-winning
educator, speaker, and consultant with more
than 20 years of experience in learning design
and development, inclusive practices, and
teaching and training. He is the author of
Upskill, Reskill, Thrive! Optimizing Learning &
Development in the Workplace (2023).

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