Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce is ATD’s latest report sponsored by Zensai, and it points to a consistent pattern across how organizations approach talent development.
ATD surveyed 350 talent development (TD) professionals and 1,035 employees to understand how organizations build learning cultures and how their people experience them. Through their findings, we’ve identified the common barriers to embracing a culture of learning, as well as practical, system-based solutions for overcoming them.
What can we learn from ATD’s findings?
72% of organizations say they lack the resources to build a culture of learning at work. But ATD’s data paints a more nuanced picture, showing that employers don’t always use their existing resources in the best ways.
82% consider learning in performance reviews, but only 36% do so for all employees. 75% provide recognition for learning, but only 28% do this consistently across the whole organization. That’s despite the fact that 79% of managers encourage voluntary learning. These findings show that many businesses already have key frameworks in place. They just tend to be isolated to specific teams or departments.
That makes it difficult to measure their impact at an organizational level. Standardizing the inclusion of learning in performance reviews and recognition can turn scattered efforts into a real talent development culture.
A similar gap exists with learning time. 46% of TD professionals say time is their biggest barrier and 66% of employees want more. But 62% of organizations already provide dedicated learning time at a median rate of 40 hours per year (a full working week).
If both sides feel it’s not enough, the processes consuming those hours aren’t sufficiently agile or visibly impactful. Informal learning methods like mentoring (used by 68%), lunch and learns, peer-to-peer learning, and communities of practice can reinforce formal training while fitting more naturally into daily schedules.
What a real talent development solution delivers
The gaps ATD identified come down to how learning activity connects across the organization. These five capabilities close them:
1. Connect learning activity to performance conversations
Workplace learning that doesn’t connect to actual performance is easily forgotten. Bringing learning progress into performance conversations lets you track it through long-term development goals and measure its impact on employee performance. That’s how the 82% of businesses that “consider” learning in reviews can not only see what someone learned, but why it mattered.
2. Make recognition consistent and visible
When recognition exists in your organization but isn’t available to everyone, it creates a gap between policy and reality. Since three quarters of organizations recognize learning for a little over one in four employees, many learners feel unfairly ignored. Giving some people recognition can actually be worse than none at all.
Scaling your recognition framework across the whole organization closes this gap. Recognizing someone’s learning progress keeps what they’ve learned top-of-mind and encourages them to actively pursue further self-development.
3. Deliver learning in the flow of work
If 40 dedicated learning hours per year aren’t enough, simply adding more time won’t change anything. A talent development system that delivers learning in the flow of work recovers much of that wasted time. Where employees would once navigate between their workspace and a separate learning management system, they can instead use that time completing courses or critically reflecting on what they’ve learned. It also means they can spend more time browsing content to find the training that’s most relevant to them.
This has the added benefit of reducing system sprawl, so IT and HR spend less time maintaining platforms and more time directly clearing blockers for employee learners.
4. Make informal learning trackable without bureaucracy
Just because some learning doesn’t happen in a formal training course doesn’t mean it’s not worth tracking. Informal and on-the-job learning options like peer coaching or stretch assignments can be easier to implement and less personally disruptive than formal training courses, making them a great choice for getting the most out of dedicated learning hours.
To use informal learning to its full potential, your talent development platform can track it like any formal course. All you need is an intended learning outcome and a metric for progression. Just make sure it doesn’t slow informal learning down, or you won’t recover any learning time.
5. Give managers real-time visibility for talent development
Since 79% of managers encourage voluntary learning, give them the means to follow it in real time. That starts with connecting each employee’s learning progress to a specific development goal, then including that goal as part of a regular employee check-in.
Your managers get updates on their team’s learning progress every week without having to chase them. They can then respond to each check-in with praise for dedication, or learning recommendations tailored to the individual.
How the Zensai platform closes talent development gaps
The Zensai platform is a combined talent development platform built by Zensai to work inside the Microsoft 365 tools your people use every day. It’s made up of our Learning Management System (LMS), as well as performance management and employee engagement software.
Streamline and tailor training
Like the rest of our platform, our LMS lives in Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint, so employees don’t waste time navigating between systems. Your talent development teams can assign and manage microlearning and informal learning the same way they would for more formal job training.
Even a five-minute module completed by an employee counts toward a development goal their manager can see. If you’re among the nearly half of TD professionals citing time as the biggest barrier, this kind of system is how you recover wasted learning hours.
Connect employee learning to goals and performance management
Although more than four fifths of organizations say they consider learning in performance reviews, this often just means looking at completion data once a year. With performance management software from Zensai, you bring learning into weekly check-ins by linking it with personal development goals that employees update every week. Your managers can surface these development goals during performance conversations.
Every course employees complete in your learning system is visible in the same place where they discuss progress, since they live alongside their performance goals.
Make your learners feel valued and engaged
While three quarters of organizations give recognition for learning, only 28% of employees actually receive it. But if organizations standardize recognition frameworks, everyone can experience the same benefits.
With our employee engagement platform, you incorporate recognition into weekly check-ins. Anyone in your organization can use the @mentions feature in Microsoft Teams or directly through our platform to tag anyone else and congratulate or thank them for their hard work. That includes recognizing learning efforts by connecting them to meaningful milestones and development goals.
The Zensai platform’s connection layer
The individual parts of the Zensai platform are useful by themselves, but using the complete platform is how you get the most from each one.
Insights from employee check-ins identify skills gaps you can address through training assignments in your LMS. Learning progress feeds directly into performance conversations through associated development goals. And trackable training assignments advance performance goals by giving employees the skills to tackle them.
Close your talent development gaps with Human Success
ATD’s report has shed light on serious issues with how organizations develop learning cultures. It’s common for organizations to experience one or more of these problems, whether they’re struggling to use dedicated learning time effectively or deliver learning recognition equally. ATD identified these talent development gaps, but the Zensai platform is how you close them.
Download Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce to see the full evidence or explore the full Zensai platform to see the solution in practice.
