By Ingrid Vaughan

Learning cultures within organizations are becoming a standard job expectation as job seekers weigh their options when saying yes to an employment offer. In an increasingly competitive marketplace of dynamic talent, such cultures have become requisite for sustainable success.

A Leap Into Learning Cultures
Case in point, organizations with learning cultures not only retain their employees, but reap the benefit of higher engagement and quality efforts from their teams. There is no question that companies need to up their game when it comes to learning and development strategies as newer generations of employees enter the workforce. For these generations, it will be an expectation – not just a perk – that learning and development opportunities are available to support career development and progression.

So what is a learning culture? It’s a collection of organizational conventions, values, practices and processes that encourage employees and organizations to develop knowledge and competence. An organization with a learning culture encourages continuous learning and understands the trickle effect that learning has on employees and the organization. Constant learning elevates individual employee performance and opens opportunities for continuous organizational transformation.

Why Organizations Need a Learning Culture
The business case for building and fostering a learning culture can be based on three core characteristics contingent to business success and linked to learning cultures:

Sustainable engagement: Organizations who want to attract, engage and retain the best and brightest must attract and nurture them through ongoing development opportunities.

Increased critical thinking and problem-solving: As employees gain knowledge, they gain confidence, which in turn leads to a problem-solving mindset and helps them make sound, thoughtful job-related decisions.

Innovation and keeping up with ever-changing technology: As technology advances, innovation remains one of the key elements of business survival in this economy, employees who are agile and able to quickly learn emerging technologies and adapt to change will be a cornerstone to business success.

It All Starts with Smart Hiring
While there are numerous ways organizations can create and sustain a learning culture, it all starts with the people they hire. Hiring for fit is essential for any company that wants quality employees who will engage with the existing team, emulate the company’s values, and be productive contributors. If a learning culture is part of your organization’s ethos and you want to sustain and grow that atmosphere, you need to hire people who will not only support but enthusiastically buy into that culture.

This process does not benefit from shortcuts. Quality hires take time, and if you try to circumvent a deep, thoughtful process, you’ll either be doing it again months down the road, or struggling to keep those people engaged.

Six Steps to Learning-Aligned Hires
Here are some steps you can take to get you closer to a quality hire.

Define the values, norms and practices that describe your business and the learning culture you are building. Do you know how to express the look and feel of your culture? How people participate in it? The attributes of the people who emulate it? Your expectations around it? Get clear these points before you even create a job posting.

Articulate those values in all of your recruitment efforts, especially job postings. Your job ads must connect back to those values and define in detail what and who you are looking for, as well as your expectations. In some ways, articulating this is more important than the job requirements. You can train and work someone with basic skills into the job, but you cannot infuse enthusiasm and buy-in to a culture the person doesn’t believe in or want for themselves.

Engage your team in the process. Arrange to have potential candidates engage with different members of your team—not just the interview panel. Notice how they interact at every level. How did they engage with the receptionist while they were waiting? How did they react when another team member passed by and introduced themselves? What was their attitude with the person who did the phone screen? Everyone on your team who has a touchpoint with potential hires should also have a solid understanding of, and ability to articulate, your business values and culture—and to embody those aspects in their exchanges with the candidates.

Assign tasks to potential candidates to determine if they have a mindset that matches your culture. For example, “We are a learning organization and our team is dynamically involved in continuous learning at every level of the company. How have you demonstrated a learning mindset throughout your personal, work and volunteer experiences?” Ask them to describe the impact of learning on their career path, or to describe their top five work values—see if learning is one of them. There are many creative ways to get to this, but asking for the information explicitly will help you find candidates who “get it” and will more likely fit than not. About 60 per cent will choose not to go through this extra step, which helps you eliminate those who don’t really want it.

Ask probing questions in interviews that move applicants beyond canned answers and require them to demonstrate how they deal with uncertainty, solve problems and approach new challenges. Ask how they learn best, what things they would like to learn over the next five years or what the most exciting thing was that they learned in the last year. Dig deeper into their work experiences and their responses to the assignment. Ask “why?” and “how” questions that force them beyond simple, surface answers. Ask questions about behaviours and attitudes that you expect from your team.

Invite prospective hires to spend a day (or even a longer trial period) in the office to learn about the inner workings and culture of the business. Watch them during this trial. How they do they interact with others on your team? What do they talk about when their guard is down? How do they handle assigned tasks and respond to a period of intense learning?

Rewire How You Hire
If you are tempted to say that you don’t have time to go through such a rigorous and time-consuming process, I’d ask you to consider whether you have time to not do so. Yes, it is more work than simply browsing through resumes and conducting an interview, but the difference in the results will be significant.

As said by Renee West, former president and COO at the successful Luxor and Excalibur hotels in Las Vegas, “You can have the best strategy and the best building in the world, but if you don’t have the hearts and minds of the people who work with you, none of it comes to life.”

Discovering the hearts and minds of potential team members before you hire them will help you bring the culture you desire to life.

As founder of SMART HR, Ingrid Vaughan is an experienced HR generalist on Vancouver Island committed to helping build dynamic, engaged teams, and growing successful businesses.

(PeopleTalk Fall 2016)