Is your L&D helping (or hurting) culture and employee retention
“The single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people,” wrote the management guru Jim Collins in an article in Fast Company in 2001.
Two decades later, it still stands. It doesn’t matter how finely-tuned your ideas might be or how precise your strategy is, when it comes to the practicalities of creating a successful business, employee retention and recruitment are absolutely crucial. In terms of productivity. In terms of culture. In terms of getting the right people with the right skills to do the right things, all while learning and understanding the ins and outs of your business.
And let’s not forget the financial burden that comes with being unable to retain employees. The Work Institute’s 2020 Retention Report estimates that every departure costs a company roughly a third of the departing worker’s annual earnings. The recruitment and onboarding costs are essentially a salary unto themselves. Put simply, employee retention is critical, and high employee turnover is bad for business.
Recent research by Better Buys showed that 92% of employees consider having opportunities that support their professional growth to be of paramount importance for job satisfaction. So, let’s look at the ways that work-based learning can help with employee retention and recruitment of top talent.
We believe work-based learning is the way forward for companies. Weaving work-based learning that focuses on strategic outcomes into your company’s fabric is a win-win. Learning tied to existing work brings teams closer together and improves employee retention and work outputs. The existing employees and potential recruits will feel nourished professionally and, an engaged, happy workforce is more productive than one that feels disposable, particularly when working towards a shared goal.
Improve your culture and employee retention through work-based learning
It’s hard to develop a company culture with a high turnover of staff. When valuable colleagues leave, they take valuable company knowledge with them. Teams can lose their mojo, disengage from their work, and feel frustrated at having to pick up the slack left behind. And when new hires start, it’s impossible to know whether they’ll stabilize or destabilize the team until they’re fully settled in.
But with a sharp focus on retaining talent and cultivating a strong culture, the potential for attracting the strongest candidates to join your team improves. And the arguments in favor of deploying work-based learning to strengthen camaraderie and improve employee retention really start to stack up:
- Using work-based learning modules strengthens team dynamics and helps them to bond.
- The more a team collaborates on work-based learning, the more they come to trust one another and feel comfortable contributing to the conversation. This, in turn, fosters increased engagement with the work and with the company. It also accelerates the ease of conflict resolution, which will prevent the atmosphere at work from becoming toxic.
- And most importantly, as a strong sense of fellowship develops, employees will feel less inclined to look for job opportunities elsewhere.
Or if you want to put it in even simpler terms: the team that learns together, stays together.
How work-based learning supports company culture
In the last couple of years, with so many businesses shifting towards a hybrid way of working, corporate culture has become a huge focus of concern. A PwC Next in Work survey even found that 36% of executives see the biggest challenge on the horizon being the effect it will have on company culture.
Work-based learning is designed to bring people together to grow and maintain high-performing teams. To align skillsets with the paths needed to achieve more. To not only improve the value of your output but to put a real value on the people who truly understand your business as well: the employees themselves.
Learn how Emergn’s work-based learning programs and pathways build a culture of continuous learning.
Additional insights
6 reasons work-based learning is better than traditional training
Reflections on workplace learning
Why Learning By Doing is key to accelerating change
