With Learning at Work Week now in the distant past (where is the time going?!), it’s easy for learning to once again gather dust on a high shelf. In a fast-paced, high-pressure business, L&D professionals can find themselves stuck in a reactive cycle, without time to step back and look ahead. Sometimes, you just need bite-sized reminders of the key stuff, to trigger new ideas or get you back on track.
So, before you forge ahead with a shiny new learning initiative or move at the speed of light to meet a request, take a moment to think about the learning environment you’re working with. Is it helping or hindering? Does it differ across teams or departments? Is anything amiss which is sabotaging your efforts from the off, and can you do anything about it?
If it’s getting in the way of your learning, it’s probably getting in the way of your learners too.
We’ve compiled our top six considerations when it comes to the impact our environment can have on learning:
Your body and space
If you’re not comfortable, either because the design of the set-up or equipment is pants, or there’s just no way to adjust it, it’s going to detract from your focus. Worse still, you’ll get a nice injury or exacerbate an existing problem like a bad back.
You’ll spend most of the time rolling your neck, shielding your eyes from the sun or hunting down blankets to stop your legs shivering, and very little time understanding what the hell GDPR is. Temperature, screen glare, noise and lack of comfort can all wreak havoc on your concentration and health, and if you’re stuck in an office where you can’t avoid these problems, you’re probably not learning much.
Fit-for-purpose spaces are a related hurdle – perhaps there’s nowhere to truly get your head down without being interrupted, a crappy wi-fi signal or noise-cancelling headphones are needed but just not available. Conversely, when you do want to gather as a group for social learning, to have an energised debate or knock around ideas, you’ll make enemies of everyone else in the room and it’s a real challenge. If our spaces aren’t set up for the learning we’re asked to (or hopefully, want to) do, we’re limited before we’ve even begun.
Top Tip: We ask new joiners to complete a DSE assessment for every working location and repeat it annually, to spot and get on top of any issues.
Are there office quick wins for supporting different kinds of work, like window covers, laptop risers, room dividers etc?
Your feedback culture
As much as we might like to think we had a natural and exceptionally high level of self-awareness, there’s nothing like real-time feedback to provide a full picture. We’re talking anonymously, all levels, customers and partners (if relevant) and about specific things. Better yet, the kind of culture where people can considerately and discreetly let you know when you could improve semi-regularly. This kind of environment, where feedback isn’t a dreaded end-of-year activity, but a daily, welcomed practice, is fertile ground for learning. Mistakes are called out and owned, goals are informed by multiple sources, and feedback is perceived not as a threat, but as an opportunity. People are learning all the time from one another – there’s an ongoing conversation with a focus on development.
An environment without feedback or where feedback is feared or discouraged can hinder personalised learning. You can miss out on understanding how you come across, working with people who can help you and accelerating your progress. If your blind spots never come into view – how can you work on them?
Top Tip: Start small and role model. We’re on the long road to nurturing a feedback culture at iAM. So far, we’ve experimented with shout-outs in our bi-weekly meetings (getting people used to recognising others), rolled out light touch training on giving and receiving feedback and started to capture the stories of those requesting it. Maybe you could lead the way.
Your ease of access
You’d love to learn but it’s so hard to find the thing you need at the time you need it. Or you know exactly where it is, but you’re exhausted by the hoops: a separate system, different sign-in details, an infographic within a pdf within an intranet. So, you give up. Sound familiar?
We’ve fallen into the trap of creating and curating learning and storing it in a sensible place, that is, a place which makes sense to us, only to discover later that not everyone has access to or uses that software.
The prospect of putting the work in to understand user profiles can be exhausting, especially at scale, but the prospect of the learning being useless is worse. So, if you’re stuck in a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Think about where people naturally gather and what they use, about clear tagging and signposting. Consider teams with bloated inboxes who might miss the email, ones on the move and those who rely on mobile-friendly or offline content.
For the learning itself – does it cater for neurodiversity? Is the packaging the most effective and efficient method, or do you just like the idea of building a two-hour virtual session on manual handling? In an ever-squeezed working world, where most of us are struggling to hold onto time and concentration, don’t let access to learning be the hurdle that trips up your learners.
This goes for requesting it to – how the budget is allocated and who decides what goes ahead – is it equitable? Is there a transparent and easy process, or are people over it half-way through the paperwork?
Top Tip: Spend time with your learners and get to understand their context. Map out their journeys and experiences to find opportunities where learning can take place in the flow and without barriers. Upskill yourself on WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), or if that’s a step too far, check out our blog – How to Approach Accessibility in your Learning Content. Re-evaluate your tech – is it there because it looks nice and sounded fancy, or does it actually do what you need it to do in your business?
Your autonomy and freedom
Some learning, particularly in heavily regulated industries, or where health and safety is paramount, needs to be pushed – that is, compulsory, in a mandated format on a scheduled basis. That might be a necessary evil where you work. Issues arise, however, when all learning is experienced in this way, when from day one, you’re placed firmly on a conveyor belt, inhaling content as prescribed, regardless of your needs and relevancy.
When ‘learning’ in an organisation only means, ‘things you must do when assigned’, people may develop a negative association with the experience. Curating and suggesting pathways to individuals can be super helpful, especially if there’s an intimidating or overwhelming volume of content on offer, but fencing them in to the extreme, where they can’t colour outside of the lines, can stymie curiosity.
The right balance of curated and self-exploration will be different across businesses, teams and even individuals. You can probably think of learning termites, always reading, listening, sharing new ideas, leaping on any opportunity to discover, and others who, given all the time and support in the world, are quite happy with where they’re at or don’t feel they have the capacity to upskill. Neither of those stances is problematic in themselves, but an environment where the onus for learning is extreme in either direction, entirely sitting on the individual or heavily controlled, risks limiting the experience of many.
Top Tip: Empower managers to have ongoing conversations with their direct reports around skills gaps, career progression and areas of interest, and find a sustainable way of tapping into this intel. Don’t be afraid of experimenting either – we’ve just launched an hour of coaching, for anyone who wants it, on anything, with an external professional. It’s on a super small scale but allows us to test the water and work with people directly on what happens next and what that looks like.
Your reflective practice
The encouragement to ‘fail fast’ and embrace failure as a positive and necessary thing on the road to learning, has included some recent caveats of late. We certainly heard a lot of talk at the Festival of Work in April; some variation of, ‘but don’t run at failure, don’t pursue it, try not to fail, just take the lesson when you do.’ I heard someone talk at length about the danger of trying to fail at speed, and what you miss in the process.
Like with all the emerging buzzwords and concepts (so often just the rebranding of ideas gone before), they’re missing the detail and nuisance and can easily be taken literally. The gold to be mined from this (in our opinion) is reflective practice. Fail, win, tumble, quit, whatever journey gets you there, it’s what you do after that counts.
An environment where debriefs happen after major events, quarter ends and/or close of projects as standard, are fantastic drivers of learning culture. Of course, if everyone sits around focusing on what was successful and passing blame, not so much. Reflective practice isn’t about beating yourself up or over-analysing every tiny thing you could have done better, it’s about trying to objectively appraise to improve, or even enhance what’s already amazing.
Including a diverse range of perspectives can lead to super valuable observations, especially from outside of the team – sometimes we’re just too close to the work to see the full picture or holistic impact.
Top Tip: We love factoring these questions into our reflection – whether ruminating in our heads or discussing as a team:
- What are my strengths and how can I further leverage them?
- What was my biggest challenge and how did I approach it?
- What would I do differently with hindsight?
- When was the last time I gave and received feedback and what happened?
- How’s my work-life balance been recently and what might I need to tweak?
Your role models
The people surrounding us have a considerable impact on our behaviour, attitudes and motivation. It’s not always the case that we look up to those at the most senior level and follow their lead. We can be heavily impacted by the people we interact with the most, our managers or anyone who has perceived gravitas. Regardless of who’s having an influence on you (conscious or not), this influence can impact your understanding of learning in your organisation and your experience of it.
Take for example, your onboarding buddy: ‘I wouldn’t bother with any of that induction stuff. No one really cares, just ignore it.’ Your manager, ‘Learning is a nice to have but never a priority here; there are more important things to do.’ Your L&D contact: ‘I like your enthusiasm but our focus has to be on compliance, not personal development – we don’t have the budget or the buy-in.’ Perhaps you’ve heard the trifecta.
There are obviously important and unavoidable limits – we’re not suggesting it’s realistic that every learning need is supported and signed off with gusto, or that learning is enthusiastically championed by every individual who also has copious amounts of time to do it – just that, we’re impressionable. We pick up on cues and mostly (with exception), we look to fit in with the status quo, rather than challenge it. If the learning culture where you are is dead in the water, it can feel pretty unfeasible to resuscitate it by yourself.
Strategies and solutions here is another blog entirely, suffice to say, it’s really important that L&D gets up close and personal with the perception of learning in their business – who’s shouting about it passionately, who’s getting in the way of it for others, who holds the power to inspire others, and a plan on how to leverage it.
Top Tip: If you have a buddy scheme for new joiners – really think about who’s going to have a positive influence, and crucially, who really wants to do it. We’ve seen compulsory buddy schemes which are pretty detrimental to someone’s early experience, when the buddy is agitated before the first conversation.
Review your leadership and people manager development schemes for focus on self-awareness – are you equipping them with the skills to check themselves, to be conscious of their direct impact? Are they bought into the benefits of learning as individuals? If not, go to the roots, rather than only focusing on the leaves.
To summarise, you can’t always change your environment (not easily, at any rate), but you can attempt to work with it. You can study it, question it, and sometimes discover ways to slowly and sustainably transform it. The better we understand the context we’re operating in, the better we’ll become at communicating, marketing, and delivering learning in our businesses.
Supercharge your learning culture with iAM Learning
Want to take your workplace learning to the next level? Take a look at our Establishing a Learning Culture eLearning Collection which covers some of the key topics above. Our beautifully-animated collection includes unique, bite-size courses covering Empowering Others, Growth Mindset, What is a Learning Culture and much more, aimed at helping you to support your team, develop talent and improve your learning culture.
Check out the course collection today, or sign up for a FREE 7 day trial to try iAM Learning for yourself!
Gemma Glover
Head of People
.png)