Written by Harish Suri of Westminster Consulting.
Harish.Suri@westminsterconsulting.ca
It is an accepted fact among employees, management and organizations in general that incorporating a strong learning culture is not only vital for their individual health, it’s essential for the healthy growth of industry and overall business. Ironically, this non-debatable acceptance tends to fizzle rapidly during challenging times and most often the first and drastic budget cuts announced are within learning and development – perhaps when it is needed the most.
Many who have traversed the fertile corporate landscape long enough soon realize the corporate life of employees, management and organizations are run by or have their distinct functioning styles, work templates, thought processes and work around layers of ambiguity.
Most of the emphasis is on 100% productivity, creating healthy project pipelines, client retention, strong billing cycles, skyward sales projections and other profit making parameters. Injecting fresh learning and development strategic initiatives and tools can break away from such a highly viscous environment and businesses can reap short and long terms benefits in every season.
The idea of creating effective learning organizations among the skyline has been voiced time and time again, and there is no doubt that executing such a concept is not going to be easy…many barriers and roadblocks have to be overcome.
How does one seamlessly integrate new skills, practices with the overall systems and functions of organizations without disrupting businesses? No immediate answers are available, however, what is available are people who are engaged in such experiences – its time these experiences are nurtured by employees, management and organizations to bring about mutually beneficial outcomes.
In today’s knowledge based and highly techno-driven global environment, professionally managed organizations are compelled to look beyond just four walls for solutions, ideas and support. The reality is that no business has the resources of having everything under one roof – it is not a viable business proposition.
In this ever changing landscape, people have used the learning organization concept to experiment and capture their experiences in order to stay abreast of competition. No one has had the a-ha moment as yet, but the need of having an effective and robust learning and development discipline is stronger than ever.
For starters, key stakeholders need to connect at all levels to reevaluate whether the fundamentals of their learning and development frameworks are actually serving the business well.
In order to create effective learning experiences which encourage mutual goals to be met, a vison has to be shared of the future they need to create and outline multi-scenarios which map onto various learning frameworks that help achieve ones goals and purpose within the organization.
Learning & Development is a vital service of enablement which businesses need to think of investing in seriously. If done right, the L&D enabler can also be translated into an effective tool to make sure that performance support is available just-in-time, just enough and just-for-me.
Before it is struck off by businesses during challenging times or otherwise, one needs to remember it is the #1 benefit the workforce values from stakeholders.