Learning Organizations: A Space where Everyone Contributes

HRxEdTech: 3 Mistakes Hindering Continuous Learning in Your Company (Part 1)

May 12, 2022

Learning Organizations: A Space where Everyone Contributes

Contents

Mistake #1: Establishing Barriers to Sharing Content

Largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the corporate training market has recently been experiencing numerous noteworthy changes. For one, the U.S. workforce is in the midst of a massive wave of restructuring, creating an increased need for training within companies. Additionally, a growing reliance on gig economy workers and freelancers is increasing the demand for low-cost education models to efficiently upskill new employees and close the gaps between workers with diverse experience levels and skill sets. These shifts and trends in the workforce are a few reasons why corporations all over the world are starting to make efforts to foster a continuous learning culture within their company.

What exactly is continuous learning? It is both a system and culture in companies that enables new and old employees alike to acquire new skills throughout their career. In a continuous learning space, learning is never-ending, and employees always strive to keep up with the most up-to-date skills, technology, and information. The most effective continuous learning organizations create a space where employees can constantly and freely share what they learn, multiplying the learning across the organization. Content can be reused, modified, and supplemented according to additional needs of future workers. However, many companies often find it challenging to create a continuous learning culture in their companies. To help HR managers create the learning organization they dream of and avoid common mistakes and pitfalls, CLASSUM is embarking on this HRxEdTech: 3 Mistakes Hindering Continuous Learning in Your Company blog series.

In many companies, the typical structure for learning entails designating one person or team to create HR training content. Even when learning, strategizing, and upskilling may be occurring throughout the organization, it is often kept within individual teams rather than shared across the company, hindering continuous and widespread learning. Not only does this lower the total volume of learning content, but it is especially inefficient and potentially harmful when dealing with individual or individual teams’ successes and failures. Success stories should be shared to identify what strategies work and can be replicated, and failure stories should also be shared to ensure mistakes are not repeated. To create a continuous learning space, learning must not only take place everywhere but also spread throughout the entire company. CLASSUM recently released an update that now allows participants, not just space administrators, to upload content, with this exact idea and goal in mind.

Blended learning, an education model that incorporates both online and offline learning curriculum, has recently become more popular in the corporate training market simply because of the logistical barriers that companies had to overcome during the pandemic. However, blended learning systems also provide the perfect platform for continuous learning. Smaller team meetings within a company, whether informative or strategic, are inaccessible to the wider company. Through a blended learning system, teams can record virtual or in-person meetings and post them in the learning space, allowing other employees to learn as well. In fact, this is exactly how the CLASSUM team operates, using our own CLASSUM company space as our authoring tool. An authoring tool is an online platform that enables one to create digital spaces to publish multimedia content in. One of the obstacles companies face in creating a learning organization is not having the right space or authoring tool to organize content in. Everyday, in our CLASSUM space, numerous different CLASSUM employees post recordings of strategic meetings, onboarding and orientation sessions, tools and technology tutorials, and more. Members of different teams actively watch other teams’ posts and discuss their curiosities or thoughts using our Q&A and discussion features, creating a space where everyone has a voice and learning constantly expands and grows.

Another critical error in HR training is employing high standards of perfection for training or learning content. Learning does not always have to take place through lengthy, flawlessly curated and designed content. Significant learning can occur from simply watching recorded meetings or short tutorials. Microlearning in the company happens when employeesgain new skills and knowledge gradually in bite-sized pieces, in contrast to learning through formal training sessions. More realistic, effective, and convenient for employees, this kind of training has become increasingly popular among companies. However, microlearning cannot take place in an environment where perfection and high quality production are prioritized or enforced. This severely limits the number of people willing and able to contribute to continuous learning and will restrict the production of learning content to a select handful of employees. Only through a culture that promotes imperfection and casual learning can a learning organization thrive. CLASSUM works to actively promote this informal learning culture within our own team: we have created a space where most of our learning content consists of raw, unedited recordings or drafts. While not as refined as what dozens more hours of production would have created, the content is original, authentic, and prolific because there are less barriers to spreading the knowledge.

Even with all the right circumstances and systems in place, a learning organization may fail to be created without the right guidance. As with many things, a lack of any guidance leads to confusion and inaction, but with just the right guidance, creativity can thrive to its maximum. Continuous learning must be consistently promoted and systematically guided to eventually be integrated into employees’ everyday work. If companies simply tell employees that a platform exists and continuous learning is a goal, their vague words are not enough to actually kickstart the growth of a learning organization. Instead, companies must delineate guidelines, goals, and opportunities for learning and sharing. For example, we at CLASSUM set specific goals for learning content, leading to a group effort for recording tutorials for tools and creating an onboarding pathway to quickly get team members situated.

To summarize: if your company is interested in creating a culture of continuous learning, first examine the people who contribute to training, development, upskilling, and knowledge dissemination in your team. Is the entire team able to or allowed to contribute? Are they encouraged to contribute, unhindered by high expectations of perfection? Have you delineated how and what team members should contribute to your learning organization? Be sure to ask these questions to avoid this first common pitfall that hinders your company from continuous learning.

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