Employees dedicate about 1% of their time to learning and development per week. I did the math: Only 24 minutes can be carved out for learning during the average 40-hour workweek. Yet, learning and development consistently rank as top priorities for both employers and employees.
People want to learn and take advantage of on-the-job training and continuous career development programs to be better performers and more skilled. But the workforce today is busy and distracted. When employees are pulled into new projects and asked to take on bigger workloads, learning, and development get put on the back burner. At some point in your career, I’d be willing to bet you had to forgo a learning opportunity or were forced to complete a training course outside of traditional work hours because you didn’t have enough time during the workday. It doesn’t have to be that way. Shifting your corporate mindset to embrace and celebrate learning at work is entirely doable. Here are three simple tips managers can implement today to make more time for learning.
Three tips to make learning and development a priority:
- Make learning part of the job – Learners are overwhelmed. In fact, according to Bersin by Deloitte, 2/3 of knowledge workers complain that they don’t have time to do their jobs. If they don’t have the bandwidth to do their jobs, they certainly won’t have time for learning. This is why making learning part of the job is critical to user adoption and success. Learners will benefit from your programs by dedicating specific hours to employee development and making those hours a job requirement. You can incorporate a learning management system (LMS) in your workplace for employee skills improvement. In addition, you can use the four assessment principles to evaluate their upgrade in skills and aptitude. The data collected can help you distribute various tasks and operations to your workers according to their skill sets. This can alleviate employees’ fear that their skills are wasted on tasks that don’t fall under their expertise and that they are wasting precious time that could otherwise be dedicated to their workload. If managers embrace learning and make it part of the job, their teams will be more engaged and more productive and, of course, more knowledgeable and better equipped to do their jobs.
- Limit the interruptions – Workers are interrupted every five minutes, and ironically enough, the interruptions are often attributed to work applications and collaboration tools. Go figure. By limiting the interruptions and forcing learners to focus solely on the task at hand, they will always walk with tangible lessons learned. I recently completed an interactive training course, and if I clicked off the module at any point during the session, it would pause. It was impossible to multitask! As a result, I paid attention to the training because I wasn’t distracted by emails and desktop alerts throughout the session. This is just one example of the dozens of ways to limit interruptions during training activities so that people can completely dedicate their attention to the lesson and gain more information and skills.
- Lead by example – Employees won’t either if managers don’t take learning seriously. The value and importance of taking time for learning must be communicated from the top down. Executives and managers are responsible for creating and emphasizing the mind shift that learning isn’t a hassle; it’s an opportunity. Check out one of our new whitepapers, written by Ed Nathanson, founder of Red Pill Talent, titled “How L&D Solves Retention and Attrition.” In the whitepaper, Ed covers a lot of different approaches to help you shift your organizational culture from dreading learning to celebrating learning.