Part 2 in our series about Employee Training: Building Culture While Building Knowledge
Employee training is a critical pillar of a positive employee culture. As we discussed last month in the first article in our series on building culture through training, what you impart to your staff, and how you do so, has a direct relationship with how people feel about working for you. It also affects how they’ll act as a result of those feelings.
When you provide high-quality training in a transparent, welcoming environment, it signals to employees that your organization values its people, their growth, and their future success. And when you make this kind of training a consistent priority, you’re on the right path to cultivating a culture of continuous learning and development that can permeate the entire workplace.
Much like you would in a healthy garden, cultivating a positive environment for thriving starts with the responsibility to provide nourishment, and to support the conditions optimal for growth. More than just bringing the “right tools” for the objective, master gardeners are observant, and responsive to conditions. They engage regularly with each plant to ensure they have what they need to thrive.
Employees deserve this kind of nurturance too! Knowing they can count on the company for the regular support and development that will enable their success makes employees feel valued, not just for what they can offer the company, but for who they are as people and as professionals. Investing in the individual and collective growth of your team not only yields better performance, it stimulates accountability, loyalty, and satisfaction across the organization.
Beyond the Basics
Last month we talked about setting new employees up for success by setting clear expectations – about their specific roles and tasks, about how the company behaves, and about why collective accountability is essential.
Now let’s look at the specific benefits of ongoing training, both to the employees and to the organization as a whole.
Why Provide Ongoing Training?
Offering ongoing training and employee development can both shape and reinforce a healthy workplace culture in a number of ways:
Fostering a Growth Mindset
Imagine if everyone in your organization were encouraged to seek new knowledge. What kind of attitude toward their jobs would that foster?
When curiosity is supported, people learn to view challenges as opportunities instead of as problems to get through. When you embrace your team’s questions and ideas with open arms, they learn you are open to change. Modeling that openness and adaptability on your part helps others lean into those attitudes as well. Creating intentional opportunities to support that curiosity, adaptability, and innovation in your staff is an excellent way to foment a growth mindset across your whole organization.
Increasing Confidence, Competence and Engagement
Remember what it feels like when you acquire a new skill? You feel a sense of accomplishment. You feel more confident in your own initiative. You might even feel a greater sense of purpose. How could those emotions contribute to your employees’ feelings about themselves in the workplace, and about the workplace itself?
When people feel confident, they are more likely to take initiative. When they feel a sense of ownership of a purpose beyond their own reward, they are willing to develop themselves to help meet those collective goals. When people achieve increased competence, they know that they can contribute more meaningfully. And they may become more proactive at seeking solutions that will benefit the whole.
Beyond building employee confidence and competence, the trust which characterizes an organization whose entire staff is this engaged is absolutely worth your investment in offering continuous learning opportunities.
Enhancing Consistency and Collaboration
Every organization wants consistency. You may have explicit expectations and practices that you expect all your employees to apply in order to achieve that consistency. But how do you communicate those processes? And when you do, how do you achieve buy-in?
Training, especially team-based training, is a wonderful way to champion collective responsibility for the work. And when you amplify the company values as the principles that underlie both the means and the desired ends, you can achieve something substantially greater than “just” good, consistent work. Building and reinforcing a common understand for how and why the work is done can also promote team unity. In turn, supporting that team ethic, with regular opportunities to practice and deepen it, can also lead to smoother conflict resolution, fresh ideas, and a deeper sense of pride in the company.
Act on Purpose!
Organizational culture will develop on its own … for better or for worse. You can choose to cultivate a culture in which continuous improvement is valued because the benefits to each and every player are clearly positive.
Looking for help developing your employee learning and development programs?
Check out SACS Consulting’s training services, and give us a call.
Next month in our Employee Training series, we’ll talk about how building a positive workplace culture can help improve safety in the workplace.