Many organizations think that becoming a learning business is not right for their business. If the development of skills and soft skills was the preserve of large groups ten years ago, this is no longer the case today.
According to Franck La Pinta, digital transformation practitioner and learning specialist:
“a learning company is an organization that sets up a culture, behaviors and processes to promote the development of everyone's skills. She considers that this addition of individual skills will increase the company's overall skills capital. It will thus become more efficient, more competitive, and more agile in the face of change.”
This definition obviously does not only apply to large groups and any type of structure, regardless of its size, can begin to change for becoming a learning business... if its leaders manage to put aside preconceived ideas. But what are they?
Myth 1: Becoming a learning business is too expensive
This is the first observation established by managers, and it is often false. Becoming a learning company is Put in the hands of employees the tools and processes necessary to promote the development of skills through mutual assistance and the sharing of resources.
These tools can be a simple social network to start with, a common open-source wiki or an LMS (the latter have seen their cost drop drastically with the development of platforms in SaaS mode). In other words, setting up tools is not necessarily expensive, it is even possible to start with free tools before considering investing.
Myth 2: Employees won't have time to train
A learning organization strives to instill a collective learning strategy based on three points: the participation of employees in the definition of objectives, teamwork and finally the autonomy of employees in their work.
The Social learning can support this approach, as this learning method focuses on interactions between the various members of the group. Each member of the group is both a learner and a trainer. and explanations, just like the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, come from interactions between individuals to obtain more explanations and clarifications. This means that employees are always in the process of being trained.
Misconception 3: A learning company does not take risks
The objective of a learning company is to adapt to changes in an agile way. To do this, it is essential to promote innovation and therefore to put employees in the best position so that they have confidence in themselves and dare to take risks.
This risk-taking must obviously be supervised to limit the negative impacts of failed attempts, but the priority remains to create a real cocoon of trust in order to transform employees into innovative project leaders. To achieve this, three imperatives must be respected:
- Recognizing individual successes
- Involving employees in decisions
- Empower employees by delegating to them the implementation of the projects they carry out.
Becoming a learning company is not a question of organization size or financial resources, but more of vision and forecasting future changes!
