The 5 Tips for Building a Learning Culture Quickly

Being successful in an ever-changing world, means being able to quickly adapt to new environments and situations. This organisational dexterity is underpinned by a culture where your people can quickly learn new knowledge and skills. But at Synaptic Potential, we know that building an effective learning culture means tapping into the brain’s learning systems and providing a work environment where those neural systems can thrive. Using evidence-based insights from the latest neuroscience findings, we not only ensure that your people can learn efficiently, but that what they learn sticks. 

Here are 5 tips for how to create a great learning culture in your organisation:

Put curiosity at the heart of your learning culture. Learning is driven by a natural curiosity to discover something new and different, whether than be a new skill, a change in mindset, or an adjusted behavior. Without this sense of curiosity at the heart of your learning culture, your people will never be able to reach their full learning potential. 

There is much more to learning than formal training sessions. Although there is a time and a place for formal training sessions, the way the brain learns doesn’t fit well with this approach. Instead a drip-feed approach where there incidental or everyday learning is integrated into the natural workplace setting and diary, means that your people can be learning anywhere, anytime.

Feedback is essential but requires a culture of psychological safety. An important element of a learning culture is ensuring that the systems are in place for giving and receiving appropriate feedback. Without these people can fall for the common illusions of knowing which displace their progress. Feedback  requires trust, openness, humility and mutual respect which forms a wider psychological safety net that ensures that your people feel comfortable in their own self and therefore are optimally placed for personal learning and development.

Make sure your people recognize when they are learning. Often people don’t recognize when they have learned something. This is especially the case with incidental or everyday learning. Training your people to become aware of when they are learning means they can ensure they capitalize on every learning opportunity to the full. 

Make learning a keystone habit.  To ensure that the learning progress of your people is maintained over time, requires the formation of habits. Although habits can take a while to form, not all habits are created equal and it is the keystone habits – the habits which have a cascade effect on other behaviors, that are the ones to encourage within your learning culture. 

Finally, it’s important to remember that all learning is important, even if, at first, it seems irrelevant to a person’s workday. This is because learning new skills and knowledge results in neural changes, which help the person make new connections in their thinking. Research is increasingly showing us that this mental flexibility is key to our ability to solve problems, create new ideas and adapt to change.