The future of work: continuous learning
GRIST recently published a whitepaper on Future skills titled “The future of work: How to future-proof the skills in your organisation”. The following is an excerpt from it. If you would like to read the full paper you can download it here.
The skills organisations possess today are not sufficient to meet the challenges of tomorrow. One of the key strategic advantages for organisations will be their ability to reskill their current workforce continuously, ensuring that skills align with business objectives.
However, as organisations strive to adapt and evolve, they need to recognise that the success of their ongoing upskilling and reskilling efforts hinges on a critical factor: organisational culture. Defined as comprising three levels – artefacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions (Schein,1984) – organisational culture can either support or impede the continuous learning necessary to keep pace with rapid change.
On the following pages, you will find a series of questions designed to help you assess how supportive your organisational culture is of continuous learning. Additionally, you will find strategies on what organisations can do to ensure that learning is supported at the cultural level.
Do the leaders endorse and role model continuous learning?
For continuous learning to become ingrained in an organisation, it needs to be supported by leadership at all levels. That support would come not only from formal endorsement of learning, but also through the leader’s active participation in learning activities, their support of experimentation and whether they allocate resources and create opportunities for their teams to learn.
Does your organisation view failure as intrinsic part of learning or something to be avoided?
How an organisation handles mistakes and failures can significantly impact its learning culture. Organisations that fear failure may discourage experimentation and feedback, stifling learning and growth. In contrast, a culture that views failures as opportunities for learning and encourages feedback and experimentation will foster a more resilient and adaptive workforce.
Does your culture support new ways of thinking and open communication?
Research highlights that a culture that promotes openness is essential for organisational learning to occur (Flores et al., 2012). This openness is reflected in how safe people feel to voice their ideas and engage in healthy conflict, their willingness to consider new ways of doing things that may be different from established practices, and their openness to sharing information and knowledge among themselves. Openness can affect whether and how well new information is acquired, how it is interpreted, and whether it is put to work effectively.
To further explore how to effectively embed a supportive learning culture, here are some strategies organisations can adopt to ensure that learning is supported at the cultural level
Demonstrate that learning is valued
To embed learning into the organisational culture, it must be integrated into the core systems and processes. This includes job descriptions, scorecards, reward and recognition, criteria for recruitment and promotion, and most importantly, operating rhythms. Organisations that do this maintain focus on learning and development, even when they are working through critical incidents. This makes them more likely to achieve their strategic priorities through whatever changes and challenges they are hit with.
Develop leaders’ mindset and capability to support their team’s development
Given the role leaders play in ensuring that continuous learning becomes a part of organisational culture, it is important to equip them with skills necessary to support their teams’ development. Leaders need to be able to translate strategic or performance objectives into the new skills and behaviours their people need to demonstrate. To facilitate this, leaders must be capable of having effective development and coaching conversations, deliver in-the-moment feedback and provide mentoring. Additionally, leaders should understand the importance of deliberate practice in learning and be able to both role-model and support this practice within their teams. By developing these capabilities in leaders, organisations can ensure that learning becomes a deeply ingrained part of the organisational culture.
Introduce low-risk experimentation
To foster a culture that supports continuous learning, organisations should encourage experimentation, starting with small, discrete actions known as micro-behaviours. These micro-behaviours, which can be quickly learned and applied on the job, should be observable, repeatable, within the control of individuals or teams, and predictive of the desired outcomes. By focusing on micro-behaviours and supplementing this approach with regular coaching and feedback, leaders and their teams can rapidly assess the effectiveness of their experiments and make timely adjustments. This method allows teams to experiment in a controlled and low-risk environment, making it easier to embrace failure as a valuable learning opportunity.
4. Introduce openness into the organisation’s operating rhythm
To promote openness within an organisation, companies should foster an environment where transparent communication and knowledge sharing are encouraged. This can be achieved by implementing practices such as regular open forums and town hall meetings where employees at all levels can voice their ideas and concerns. The same approach can be applied at a smaller, team level, with team huddles or similar activities introduced as part of a leadership operating rhythm. By promoting these practices, organisations can create a culture where employees feel valued and safe to share their thoughts, thereby enhancing collective learning.
