Learning is a valued way of life and essential to growth within an organisation, reveals new research from the Association for Talent Development (ATD).
The report, Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organisation, found this helps promote a collaborative environment where knowledge is readily shared, and performance steadily improves, at both the individual and organisational levels.
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Despite the benefits, only 31 percent of organisations have well-developed learning cultures.
ATD and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) explore the robust cultures of learning as distinct hallmarks of organisations that consistently produce the best business results – companies that lead the world’s markets in revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction.
Key research findings are:
- Having a culture of learning is a hallmark of high-performance organisations. Top companies are five times more likely that lower performers to have extensive learning cultures.
- In high-performance organisations, employees share knowledge with their colleagues at a rate four times greater than that of workers in lower-performing firms.
- An employer’s commitment to ongoing talent development during prehire interviews is a distinguishing trait of high-performance organisations. However, just 22 percent of all respondents have these conversations with candidates.
- High-performance organisations are three times more likely than lower performers to hold leaders at all levels accountable for actively demonstrating the importance of learning.
- In organisations with strong learning cultures, employees are aligned with the goals of the business.
- The learning function’s participation in talent planning activities is linked to better market performance.
- Impact measurements—assessing learning’s effects on worker behaviour and on business results—are differentiators applied extensively by fewer than one in four organisations.