People are not robotic in nature. Confining workers to a box where they continue with the same repetitive task will only kill their soul and belittle their learning abilities. In an article for Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Mara Swan explore how the workforce has evolved from the mundane to encouraging workers to maximize their learning.
A Concentrated Strategy
According to the article, a person’s “employability” actually depends on what the person is likely to learn. This indicates that career security is growing more dependent on a person’s ability to learn. The unfortunate truth is that most employers have yet to accept that the highly qualified individual on paper does not always translate into the best employee. The great employees are the ones who are able to ask the insightful questions and grow beyond their expensive piece of paper obtained in their twenties.
Learning in the workplace is much more fluid and far less structured than learning on a college campus. Employees must continue to be productive in the present by getting their work done, but they must also invest in their long-term intellectual well-being. Despite all of organizations’ efforts in training and development and the billions of dollars spent annually, the truth of the matter is most programs do not have any long-term effects on employee job performance. Chamorro-Premuzic and Swan suggest that organizations do three things to better encourage learnability in the workplace:
- Be selective
- Encourage
- Reward
Not every employee has demonstrated the full capability to learn, and so organizations should be selective in their decisions of who to further develop. If managers want to see these endeavors be successful, they need to encourage employees to learn new things. One great way to encourage people is to embrace learning yourself. Finally, reward people who are learning new things. One of the best rewards is to provide the high-learners with new and challenging opportunities.
You can read the original article here: https://hbr.org/2016/07/its-the-companys-job-to-help-employees-learn
