Learning the Ropes: How Training and Development Will Improve Your Company Culture

by Frankie Wallace, Guest Contributor

Your business is your baby. You love it. You want your employees to love it. You can’t imagine doing anything else. Your business is where you want to be. And you want your employees to feel that way, too. After all, you’ve worked hard to recruit the perfect team and when they come to work each day, you want them to feel like they are among family. You are in it for the long haul with your carefully-selected, hand-picked staff, and you want them to be in it for the long haul too.
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But how do you make that happen? It may come as something of a surprise, but one of the best tools for building a company culture that your employees can’t resist is to invest in training and development. When you do that, you help them build a vision of their future with your company. And if they can see it, they can be it. We’ll show you how!

Know Your Team
One of the best ways to use training to build a company culture that draws—and keeps—the best talent around is to figure out what your team needs. Enter big data. The market is overflowing today with affordable, user-friendly, highly sensitive analytics tools to help you determine what your team needs to help them reach their highest potential, both as individuals and as a group.

It can also be tremendously helpful to bring a chief learning officer (CLO) onboard. The CLO combines professional expertise in your industry with advanced training in education. That means that the CLO has both the knowledge and the experience to transform your business into a learning-leader and your team into the very best the industry has to offer!

Making Your Business a Center of Learning
If you’re looking to build a culture of continuous improvement, you don’t have to be confined to the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school experience. You can bring your training in-house, recruiting the best educators and the most successful professionals in your field to offer workshops, seminars, and lectures specifically for your team.

Harness the Power of Virtual Reality
Gifting your team with the experience of a face-to-face workshop or seminar with industry experts is a great idea, of course, but it’s not always feasible. That doesn’t mean you have to give up on your ambition to build the best, most engaged team around, however!

We truly live in the technology age, and that’s fantastic news for you and your employees because that means the learning opportunities are practically endless. Consider virtual reality: it’s not just for gamers anymore! In fact, with today’s new VR technologies, you can hook your team up with some of the most advanced interactive training tools.

​These VR simulations can do pretty much everything from helping your team learn to perform complex medical procedures to enable them to experiment with building design or civic disaster response scenarios. In short, no matter what your field, product, or service, there’s a training tool for that!

Spirit and Mind
Supporting your employees’ development is about more than just enlarging their minds or expanding their skill sets. It’s also about supporting their mental and emotional health. Stress, anxiety, and burnout are a significant consideration that employers who truly want to promote their employees’ highest potential must attend to.

Nurses, for example, are at significant risk of burnout, simply due to the intense and ongoing emotional and psychological demands of the work. However, studies show that resilience training can be enormously effective in helping nurses develop the coping skills they need to not only avoid burnout but to perform optimally.

The Takeaway
Every company has a culture, and the quality of that culture is not only going to determine how happy and effective your staff are, but it’s also going to dramatically impact how long your staff sticks around. Developing a strategy to optimize your employees’ development, to support and encourage them in reaching their loftiest goals and highest potential, is going to cultivate the kind of culture that your most talented employees simply can’t resist.

What you’ll have is, essentially, a horizontal culture, one where everyone contributes, one where everyone has an opportunity to learn, grow, and develop. Your company’s horizontal culture is one where your team becomes a family. And that’s because your company is one that invests in its people, that believes in them, and expects from them nothing less than their best.

​All in all, a culture of continuous learning is a culture of excellence combined with commitment. It is a strategy of investing in your team, as people first, so that your team will invest in you. It is, in the final analysis, a strategy that uses training and development to prove to your team that their success and the company’s success are one and the same.
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About the author:

Frankie Wallace is a recent graduate from the University of Montana. Wallace currently resides in Boise, Idaho.

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