What does organizational learning mean?
By reflecting on and analyzing its performance, both good and bad, an organizational learning approach helps businesses learn from their mistakes and grow. Let’s take a look at the fundamentals of developing a strategy for organizational learning.
First, let’s define organizational learning so we can understand it better before we go into the specifics of an organizational learning plan.
Organizational learning refers to the steps taken by a company to increase its knowledge base, share that knowledge with others, and then use that data to influence strategic decisions. Your business should incorporate new knowledge into its operations as it develops and gets more experience and competence.
Organizational learning encompasses a wide range of concepts, including product-market fit, your ideal customer, and product creation, among many others.
With organizational learning, you can expect three main outcomes:
- Knowledge creation: Acknowledging fresh perspectives on the company.
- Knowledge retention: The process of converting each person’s implicit lessons into formally recorded knowledge.
- Knowledge transfer: The process of imparting lessons to the business.
Take, for instance, the position of employee of a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. Your product’s lack of user-friendliness is driving away customers. An example of organizational learning would include collecting and documenting customer feedback in a clear and organized manner, and then collaborating with product, sales, and IT to develop a strategy to enhance the product and reduce customer loss.
A well-organized internal program will help you accomplish two goals: first, making sure your staff remembers what they’ve learned and second, making sure they share that knowledge with the right people in your company.
Communities of knowledge
Within any given company, you could find four distinct kinds of knowledge communities:
Individual
The focus of individual learning is on a single individual, as the name suggests. Here, your worker will get both technical and interpersonal know-how that will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your team. The choice to disseminate one’s knowledge to one’s immediate team or the larger company rests with the individual. Above all else, when an individual quits a team or company, their expertise leaves as well.
Group
Everybody knows that there’s a lot that people can pick up from one another. In a business setting, this is paramount. The exact nature of group learning has been defined in several ways. Some people think that when a group works together, they learn best when they do something, get feedback, and use that information to improve their next move. Some people think of group learning as members of a team imparting their own expertise to one another. Group settings are crucial for the exchange of fresh knowledge, regardless of the definition.
Organizational
Even though all four kinds of knowledge communities play a role in your organization’s learning strategy, you must identify this one apart from the others. The process by which your company generates, organizes, and retains information is known as organizational learning. It permeates every facet of your business, from human resource management to customer success to information technology security. Various rates of learning also apply here. Quarterly sales learnings, for instance, will not yield learnings as quickly as frequent product team experimentation. The goals of organizational learning are to increase team efficiency, adjust to unpredictable circumstances, and adapt to changing business conditions.
Across organizations
The term “inter-organizational learning” describes the process by which various businesses pick up tips and tricks from one another. Because someone on your team has already done the legwork, you can get more done in less time using this approach. You can learn from the mistakes of other companies, which further reduces risks. When researching their franchise business model, franchisors frequently employ this strategy.
What does organizational learning look like in practice?
Organizational learning is a powerful tool that many businesses utilize to expand their product lines and increase sales. The Walt Disney Company is a good case in point. Their work on Disney princess films and theme parks is well-known to many. But via organizational learning, Disney keeps coming up with new kinds of entertainment. In addition to its TV network and music production, they have just entered the streaming service market with Disney+.
In 2015, in response to shifting customer preferences, Disney introduced its first streaming service to the UK. As the pioneer in its streaming service line, DisneyLife was the company’s initial offering. Disney learned a lot about streaming service user preferences during the next five years. Then, in 2019, they launched the improved Disney+ that we are familiar with today.
This is a case of a company expanding into a new product market, but if you want to be a learning organization, you don’t have to make huge changes every week. On the contrary, if done correctly, your business should constantly learn and make little adjustments.
What is a strategy for organizational learning?
Only eight percent of CEOs report seeing tangible benefits from their investment in learning, according to McKinsey. The success of your firm, nevertheless, depends on its organizational learning approach. In order to help your team contribute to your company’s broader strategic goals, it is important to have a well-crafted organizational plan. In order to meet the demands of your staff, partners, and clients, it also involves retaining and transferring knowledge.
The four most important questions that an organization’s learning strategy should address are:
In order to successfully launch a learning company, what information is essential?
How will we develop, evaluate, share, and implement our fresh insights into the company?
Who is going to make sure that we put our knowledge to work by creating, analyzing, sharing, and applying it?
In what ways will our company implement these strategies?
When leaders fail to lay forth a clear plan, their organizations often flounder and fail to meet expectations.
To what extent does your company’s performance depend on its organizational learning strategy?
Many factors, including a digital revolution, a workforce that spans generations, and the ongoing need for employees to reskill and upskill in order to remain competitive, have contributed to the changing nature of the global workforce over the last decade, according to McKinsey. Consequently, your business will benefit from an effective organizational learning strategy because:
Staying ahead of the competition is one of the main challenges for every firm, especially in today’s ever-changing business climate. To keep your competitive edge and attract customers, you need to use a number of strategies company-wide. In order to innovate and remain ahead of the competition, your firm must ensure that its people are continually creating, keeping, and transferring knowledge.
The ability to change with the times: Every CEO knows that in order to keep their firm afloat, they must be able to adapt. When teams had to work remotely due to the COVID outbreak, we noticed a lot of organizations doing this. In addition to adopting a new mindset, businesses have to reconsider their product-market fit. Success now requires the ability to solve problems.
Productivity and profitability both see a significant uptick in learning firms compared to their non-learning counterparts. Workers improve their efficiency and output as they gain knowledge. They make sure that their teammates are just as productive when they share what they’ve learned with the team. In addition, your company’s bottom line will benefit from a more productive staff.
Promoting innovation: To help your company realize its maximum potential, it is essential to have a strong organizational learning plan. It accomplishes this by fostering an office climate that encourages employees to learn from one another, collaborate effectively, try new things, and ultimately reflect on their findings.
The steps to take in developing an effective strategy for organizational learning
- Make sure your company’s goals and your organizational learning plan are in sync.
Alignment with your company’s strategic objectives should be your top priority when establishing an organizational learning plan. Let’s say the goal for your business is to increase sales by a specific amount in a new market. Your plan should help your staff reach that goal. Make sure your organization knows the impact your goal should have by sharing it with them once you’ve decided on it.
When developing an organizational learning strategy, business divisions should work closely with HR and L&D. By working together, they can guarantee that the company is constructing and using new knowledge in accordance with industry standards for learning and development as well as business practices.
- Make organizational learning an integral part of your company’s culture.
You can attract and keep employees who share your passion for growth, improvement, and innovation if organizational learning is deeply ingrained in your company’s culture. Incorporate a learning culture into your company in a variety of effective ways. One approach is to make learning a fundamental value and use it as a metric for team performance reviews.
You may help your employees and teams successfully acquire new skills, abilities, and behaviors by establishing a learning culture in your company and implementing a strong talent development program. That allows a company to make adjustments and enhancements.
- Help people try new things
Trying new things is a great way to learn. As an entrepreneur, you might have to test the waters in a single city with a new product, for instance. Your team will be able to make better judgments based on data gathered through experiments, which will allow you to test theories and acquire experience.
Many of your ideas may fail when you do experiments, but that’s okay; failure is a necessary part of learning. If you want to know how to improve for the next experiment, you have to fail at it.
- Evaluate and strengthen your knowledge management
Acquiring new information as a group is the goal of organizational learning. Therefore, it is imperative that you safeguard the information so that it remains intact when an employee departs. Knowledge management isn’t complete without a well-defined framework for teamwork and information sharing.
Knowledge retention and transfer can be implemented in several methods inside your firm. Some examples include graphics and videos, documentation, customer relationship management systems, or even a specialized team whose job it is to help with learning. Confluence, Nuclino, and Gitbook are just a few examples of the many internal knowledge databases that your company might use to store and share information.
- Encourage teamwork
Continuous learning from one another is essential for good learning. Out of 1,400 people surveyed for a Salesforce study, 86% blamed ineffective teamwork for company failures.
In order to foster a culture of information sharing among your team members, you can implement strategies such as cross-team weekly meetings, brainstorming sessions, or stand-up meetings.
- Keep the hybrid/remote configuration in mind.
The virtual world in which your company operates should be a factor in your strategy. Research has demonstrated that hybrid or remote models, when implementing remote working best practices, outperform in-person teams in terms of invention, according to Scientific American.
Slack, Asana, and Miro are just a few examples of the many technologies available for asynchronous alignment and the promotion of innovation and continuous learning—ideal for teams who are still working remotely, have gone remote permanently, or are spread out over multiple time zones.
- Evaluate where you are
Document the processes by which your company generates, stores, and shares information. Remember that there isn’t a single metric for this. A simple approach would be to break the process down into its component parts: creating, retaining, and transferring. Your key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives, and metrics can all be defined from that point on.
To gauge how well your staff remembers information, you may, for instance, have them add three new papers to your knowledge databases every month. Another option is to hold company-wide knowledge transfer sessions once every three months or to keep tabs on how often your team has brainstorming sessions.
One last thing
With the support of a well-designed organizational learning plan, any business may boost its efficiency, productivity, and bottom line. You can get closer to your organization’s goals by incorporating it into your overall learning plan.
