How to create a learning culture | 7 ways to develop a growth mindset in your employees

Are you looking to create more autonomy within your workforce and foster innovation?

Creating a learning culture within your organisation will significantly boost employee engagement and performance. When people find solutions to their problems and blockers instead of immediately going to their line manager or boss, they’re able to grow professionally, adapt to challenges more successfully, and exceed your expectations.

The commonly attributed sentiment ultimately holds true: the best leaders create more leaders. With that in mind, here are our top tips to cultivate a team of leaders operating with growth mindsets. 

1. Give your staff autonomy wherever you’re able

Encouraging employees to find solutions on their own helps to facilitate independent thinking, and can result in more innovative solutions. Rather than micromanaging your employees, or your team, pose thought-provoking questions that can guide their decision-making. This way, you’re keeping a thought bubble above your employees’ heads, they’re not looking to be spoon-fed an answer, they’re thinking through solutions.

This approach helps develop soft skills and keeps employees engaged in their work, and leads to a richer internal talent pool from which to promote. Think about it this way, when you need a new team leader or intrapreneur to head a new project or division, who would you hire? The candidate you’ve micromanaged and babysat for however long, or the external candidate that can demonstrate numerous examples of challenges and problems they’ve overcome and solved, and how they’ve fine-tuned their approach over time.

Pro tip: By incorporating gamified courses that help develop work-specific skills and soft skills, such as problem solving and leadership, you can not only cultivate a team of self-starters, but you can also enhance your employer brand.

2. Foster a supportive environment that encourages your employees to ask questions

Promoting open communication and creating a safe space for employees to ask questions and share their opinions will help invest your employees more thoroughly in the business, and could well provide useful feedback and solutions to big picture challenges.

When curiosity and feedback is welcomed by an organisation, employees feel empowered to contribute more.

Good ways to do this include holding open forums on big developments and moves for the business, and tagging more employees into tasks to offer their feedback on what’s being worked on.

In cases where your business is quite large, or the developments are sensitive, this approach will necessarily be scaled down to smaller teams of appropriate personnel. For example, if you have 3,500 staff on payroll and you’re developing a product which is not yet patented that has the potential to change the game in your industry, it wouldn’t be prudent to put out a company-wide email.

3. Include employees in skills gap audits

Involve your employees in assessing their own skills gaps through customised Surveys and discussions at performance reviews.

Your employees will have valuable insights into their own learning needs and aspirations, which in turn can help you tailor learning initiatives to address real-time skill requirements within your business.

4. Use gamified courses to make structured autonomous learning part of your culture

You can introduce structured autonomous learning from day one with gamified courses during onboarding. These are a lot easier to make and implement than you probably think, as through gamification platforms like Drimify, you’re able to customise existing game engines with your copy, images, and branding. Gamified courses can be played through independently of an instructor and an allocated space and time.

Creating such courses to help your employees develop through the onboarding process, and subsequently, throughout their career with your company, offers a lot of benefits for your business. They promote self-directed learning, and also integrate learning seamlessly into your company’s culture, making professional growth an inherent part of the employee experience, and your employee value proposition.

5. Have an upskilling roadmap and make your employees part of it with quarterly development reviews

Performance reviews can feel a bit like parents’ evening or parent-teacher conferences. Rebranding them into something proprietary to your company, and tailoring them to suit your business’s specific developmental needs can go a long way to making them less of an arbitrary box-ticking exercise, and more of an empowering and productive discussion.

They should be viewed as an opportunity, for both the business, and the employee, to collaborate on a personalised upskilling roadmap. This creates a sense of ownership for the employee, and makes it easier for them to align themselves with the corporate mission.

First steps: If this point has made you realise that your performance reviews are a bit of an afterthought, or that you’ve lost touch with the performance review process for the rank and file in your business because you’ve been focusing on other things, don’t panic.

The first step is to start auditing the process and identifying anything that’s productive and should be retained, as well as anything that needs to be thrown out or optimised. Beyond that, brainstorm across multiple departments to come up with a performance review process that serves your organisational needs.

Pro tip: Well planned performance review processes take a while to yield results. Do your research, put your plan into effect, but be patient. The strength of a good process lies in its ability to track employee progress and development over longer periods of time.

6. Make learning new skills an event that people look forward to and aspire to be a part of

When used sparingly, it can be hugely productive to host immersive learning events that employees eagerly anticipate. 

For example, offering full-day management development courses dedicated to specific skill areas would be a highly desirable event to attend for employees who are looking to progress within your organisation.

Equally, if you‘re a specialist retailer, partnering with brands you stock to put on training events or away days can not only save on the costs of running such an event, but allow you to upskill your front-line employees on technical products far more effectively than if they stayed in store. The employee who attends the event can then provide ad-hoc training and be a point of reference for other store colleagues.

Pro tip: Events like these need structure, and this is where gamification can come in clutch. Including gamified experiences throughout your itinerary can help break the ice, engage attendees’ minds, promote healthy competition, and foster camaraderie.

7. Make feedback positive and normalise debate

Shift your company’s culture around feedback by emphasising the positive impact it can have on growth. Encourage your people to have open discussions and debates, even if they challenge the status quo. While disagreements can be uncomfortable, being able to discuss complex matters in a constructive way is essential to forward momentum. Pressure makes diamonds, and pressure is seldom comfortable.

Positively reinforce when employees challenge ideas constructively, even your own, as this can show bravery and character, and they’re contributing to a culture of innovation and resilience. They’re willingness to speak up, and your actions accordingly, are what can flush out any “Yes men” culture within your organisation.

Pro tip: Even constructive criticism delivered with the biggest kid gloves can be tough for some people when they’re not used to it, particularly if they’re just out of university or new to the workforce. It can be good to talk about feedback in the induction process so it’s not too much of a shock when someone criticises their proposal or suggests a lot of edits on a piece of work.

Some organisations even encourage their staff to respond to any feedback with, “Thank you,” or something else that’s positive. Because language is essentially our cultural operating system, vocalising gratitude can help people to accept feedback with the intent with which it was hopefully given.

Key takeaway

Creating a learning culture ultimately comes down to empowering employees to be more autonomous in their development and reach their potential faster. If your business is the people that operate it, investing in their growth as individuals creates the best possible environment for sustainable business growth to occur.

These 7 approaches are all actionable, and can be applied across sectors and business functions.