Learning Organization and Effective Learning

Bizmanualz Solutions

Question of the month: How does work environment contribute to effective learning/training?

In July, the focus of our articles was on learning and how it benefits the organization. Learning is often perceived as expensive, time consuming, and even disruptive. While this perception may be fairly accurate for the immediate short term, the long term benefits of learning is well established and cannot be ignored. The question, then, is not “how can we afford training?�? but, rather “how can we afford not to invest in training?�?

Are You Building a Learning Organization?

Businesses are willing to invest in buildings, infrastructure, and equipment, while ignoring their most valuable asset, the people that make products, interact with customers, and run the internal processes that are vital to success. Instead, it is too common to find companies slashing training and education budgets.

Read more about learning organizations…

Make the Most of Organizational Learning

While there are abundant educational avenues that should be open for employees and managers to pursue, learning and education should not be done haphazardly. The path should be carefully selected and focused on meeting the needs of the company and the needs of the employees. While all learning does not have to come with a huge fee, a commitment to learning should be reflected in an organization’s budget, as well.

Read more about organizational learning…

Get the Most out of Training Transfer

There are three basic elements to consider in order to receive the most benefit from a learning plan; the learner, the learning provider/event, and the environment the learner returns to after the learning event. Organizations and managers should be active in making the most of their investment by ensuring that they are promoting effective training.

Read more about the benefits of training transfer…

If there is any single message from this series of articles, it is the value of learning, that effective training can make a big difference in the organization, both directly and indirectly. A culture of learning and improvement is key to long term success.

On That Note

Answer to this month’s question:
The environment the trainee returns to after a learning event has a lot to do with how much of the learning is practiced and retained. Complex cultural attributes are what guide the associate. For example, how is learning valued, how much control do employees feel over their own work, and how much supervisory and peer support do they receive?

Even in organizations where the culture makes training transfer difficult, managers can use some approaches to improve learning transfer. As the learner’s manager or supervisor, showing that you are interested and willing to apply what they learned is extremely important. The idea is to have fertile soil that will allow the seed to grow, not a dry, hostile atmosphere, where the seed will wither away.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments. Our policies, procedures and processes articles site has tons of useful information. Also, please let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed in our future articles.

Regards,
Chris
Bizmanualz

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