Ready for a staggering statistic? According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of team members said they would stay at their company longer if it invested in their career development. Now, here is the kicker: the report also said that the top reason team members said they felt held back from learning is because they didn’t have the time to learn the skills they needed to.

How do we fix this dilemma? By providing a workplace that offers learning opportunities that also provides the time for team members to take advantage of those learning opportunities. This will spark creativity because I know that I’m always happiest and most productive when I’m learning something new.

We get it – everyone is busy. We go to work and we are chained to our desks (or today: our laptops and iPhones) with mounds of work to get through and we form routines and things eventually become mundane and ultimately boring. Things don’t have to be this way, though.

HOW ARE TEAM MEMBERS ACTUALLY SPENDING THEIR TIME?

The first step is to get feedback from team members on how they are spending their time at work. These questions can be asked on many subjects at work. For example, how many meetings are absolutely necessary? Rethink why you have meetings. If there is too much email or point-to-point communication preventing people from learning, it is time to really rethink the company’s time management.

WHERE DO TEAM MEMBERS LIKE TO LEARN?

Second, find out how, when and where employees like to learn so you can gain context to establish a new way of learning, which we are all trying today to facilitate via different workplace spacial designs. In the LinkedIn report, team members said the following:

·       68% of team members want to learn at work

·       58% of team members want to learn at their own pace

·       49% of team members prefer to learn at the point of need

Not every type of learning is going to happen in a classroom or even warrants days off at a time. There are plenty of informal and social settings to learn in. The real key is to connect the bridge between how your team is spending their time and what the actual definition of learning looks like in this day and age.

It is entirely too easy to say that we are too busy to learn new things, but the truth is, we are hurting our careers and our companies by staying stagnant and not growing towards new ideas and processes. Dig deep and talk to your team and find out what they want to learn, how they want to learn and when they want to learn it.

Make it happen for you and your team and your business will experience success it has never experienced before.