1) Run employee engagement projects in sprints to get insights for long term planning.

It is crucial for you to understand the business’s strategy and test different learning solutions to get what has the potential to work best for your people.

Let’s say you wish to learn what learning culture and tools are right for your people. Some of the most effective People leads we know are comfortable asking a provider to run a pilot of their content or technology to understand how it can fit within the overall proposition offered to employees.

They’re at ease running short sprints, know what short term behaviours to look out for and aren’t afraid to go against the ‘it’s what we’ve always done attitude’.

2) Get the importance of soft skills (and act upon it)

How many times do you hear of soft skills training being pushed down the priority list in favour of “tangible” training?

You get that soft skills play an important part in confidence and performance levels. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that this lack in investment in soft skill development can often be the underlying issue of why there’s inter-team conflict.

It’s those businesses who recognise that this and act on it that create the right performance environment for staff.

For example, we talk with employees who tell us challenges they face at work. It is not uncommon to hear when someone wants to criticise a boss but they are afraid. Or what about the team mate who won’t conduct a call in a open plan office because they’re worried about looking stupid?

Why wouldn’t you invest it soft skills which would help your employees to make an impact sooner?

3) Check in with employees at different stages of the employee lifecycle stage to anticipate future challenges

Survey people, collate results from performance reviews and create spaces that people feel confident to share real feedback.

We find that learning cultures who do so and align against the employee lifecycle are able to demonstrate what GOOD looks like which means career paths are clear and impact is made sooner.

Even better, these teams check in every few months - rather than waiting a year - to act on the feedback. By being accountable and committing to regular feedback shows the rest of the business just how important learning is.