As we get further into 2016, hopefully you're bringing more and more fresh ideas into your organization – as long as you've found the right channel for learning.
Does your company as a whole attend webinars? Webinars serve as a flexible source of brilliant information. There are always a wide range of events taking place at any given time - and most of them are free of charge, too! Webinars offer a convenient opportunity to bring in ‘bite sized’ portions of knowledge from experts that can be implemented quickly without requiring a large investment of time.
Making this happen, however, requires emphasis from leadership and management. Employees naturally invest effort in the areas they know they will be evaluated on. Why not welcome this approach of learning by fostering a culture of creativity?
Lead by Example
The best practices start at home. If you want your staff to attend more webinars and bring that knowledge back to the team, get the trend started by doing it yourself. Pick a webinar that seems like a good example, attend it, and share what you have learned afterwards. If the event is available on demand, share the recording with the team. This approach comes with a double benefit: your team will see that you are sincere about the importance of learning and you will advance your own skills.
Reinforce through Recognition
Encourage people to keep track of the webinars they attend during the year by saving registration/confirmation emails and briefly writing down what they learned in each event. Those attendance records and notes then become part of each person’s review or employment record. Over the course of the year, the individuals that embrace the effort are likely to see a bump in their performance and can then receive recognition for their additional effort.
Make it Fun
While virtual individual attendance is one of the key benefits of the webinar format, it’s certainly not a requirement. If there is an event coming up that is relevant to the whole team, register and attend on site. This gives you the opportunity to network with individuals face to face. Positioning learning as a team building activity rather than just more work for each individual will increase attendance.
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” as the old saying goes. Today we might add to that: “position learning as a box to check and the task will probably be completed; encourage and reward curiosity wherever you find it, and you will enable your team and organization beyond what you could ask for.”
Incorporating virtual learning into the culture of your organization is an efficient, cost effective way to improve the knowledge, skills, and performance of your team. There is no time like the present to put learning at the heart of your efforts.
This article was made possible by our partners at Webinara:
https://www.webinara.com/2015/11/are-you-fostering-a-culture-of-curiosity/
