Continuous Learning is Necessary for Continued Success

In my last Insight, I explained that continuous learning is very important, even for your “expert” employees. 

Employers who are interested in offering continuous learning opportunities to their employees can take three steps: 

1. Know Your Market/Industry—The way you ran your business when you first started it all those years ago is going to be different than the way you run your business today. A lot of times, though, business owners lose touch with what’s going on in their industry and they lose sight of who their competition is.
   
   Early in my career, I had the opportunity to work for a large entertainment company. The company employed about 33,000 people, and the company was very, very, very aware of what was going on in the entertainment/attraction industry.
   
   One of the company’s biggest competitors at the time was a large destination point in Branson, Mo. The company was doing whatever needed to be done to understand what the appeal of the other vacation destination was.
   
   So there was an initiative to do some re-engineering to make the company more appealing, and it really impacted the entire culture of the company.
   
   That’s why understanding what’s going on in your market/industry and understanding your competition is so important.
   
   
2. Know Your Employees—You have to know what’s going on in the minds of your employees. The reality is that, as an employer, you probably function in a role as a C-level executive or as part of the C-level team. And if you’re in a corporate environment, you might not always have insight into what’s going on day-to-day at your company.
   
   Let’s say you’re a manufacturing plant or a retail operation—How do you get effective, good, strategic feedback from the “grassroots” part of your business so you can parlay that into something that will help your business become stronger?
   
   You have to solicit it. You have to know what’s going on. An HR assessment process can help with that because it provides valuable insight and valuable feedback with regards to what’s going on within your company at the “grassroots” level.
   
   
3. Know Where to Get Help—As an employer, you need to know where you can get help for your company when/if you need it. And knowing where the resources are can help employers effectively point their employees in the right direction by offering continuous learning and improvement opportunities. 

Continuous learning isn’t always something employers ask for advice on, but it’s always something I recommend when I work with employers. 

In order to continue to be successful as an organization, you need to have some type of continuous learning and improvement process in place so that you can keep moving ahead. 

The reality is companies want better efficiency and they want a bigger bottom line, and in cases where I’ve consulted with companies on how to do this, continuous learning has always been a component. 

Continuous learning is about changing the culture of a company. It’s about increasing the knowledge of the company’s employees by giving them additional training opportunities. 

As employees learn more, it’s going to impact your management staff, and they’re going to be interacting differently with employees than they were before. Next thing you know, the entire culture of your company is different, in a good way. 

Also, companies I’ve worked with who have integrated continuous learning have seen their revenues increase. Some had small increases (a couple percentage points); some had double-digit increases (in some cases, from 15 percent to upwards of 20 percent). It just depended on how much opportunity there was within the company to learn new skills. 

Just the opposite occurred for companies I worked with that have not taken recommendations to incorporate some kind of continuous learning process within their business model. Some of those companies wound up going out of business; some of them continued to struggle and some of them continued to maintain until something happened—a stronger competitor came along or the market changed—and they were literally dealt a knock-out blow. 

So for me, continuous learning helps a company become better, stronger, faster and more open to improvement. 

If you’re a continuous learner, you’re like moving water—you always have the potential to produce power. 

But if you’re a company that doesn’t offer continuous learning, you’re like stagnant water. And we all know what stagnant water is like: it stinks, it doesn’t do anything good for its environment and it doesn’t produce long-lasting results. 

Don’t be one of those companies; offer continuous learning opportunities to your employees.

Continuous learning helps a company become better, stronger, faster and more open to improvement.