Making people awesome
Most companies invest a lot of money on your employees like trainings, courses, workshops, talks, significant events, etc. The companies expect that they will improve some employees skills and knowledge. I believe this approach will make some improvements for sure, but I’m not sure if this is the right approach because the employees could get used to it and sometimes will wait for the company to do something to teach new things. Another weird situation can happen like “I cannot do this task because I didn’t receive the training.” believe me, this is not the profile that you wanna in your team. There is a better behavior that I expect in that situation, like “I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll figure out how to do it, maybe I’ll take longer to do.” and that is ok, give some time for him learn new things and solve the problem. The companies must provide this kind of situation in your environment. I genuinely believe the company should help, but only 50%, another 50%, should be for the employees initiative.
50% of the company
First of all, take a look at my previous post called Effective Learning. I talk about learn how to learn, and this is the key for the knowledge improvements. Sometimes the company’s knowledge is limited because it only knows the technologies they use in its systems, that is, are restricting the understanding of your employees too.
So maybe the company may work like a mentoring to show the way for its employees rather than teach everything to them. This approach will provide an environment where the people could bring new technologies or ideas into the team.
As a mentoring, the company can create a path of learnings in different ways like frontend development, backend development, etc. The employee can choose his path to improve your skills or to learn something new. This flexibility of learning is beautiful because it is a fuel for the desire to learn what you like.
Remember that we don’t want teachers or courses here, we want mentors to help on the way. The path of learning is about challenges or problem-solving; the real challenges that happen in our day by day. The employee should look for the knowledge by its self, and they are free to learn what they need to solve the problems.
The company may introduce gamification here for keeping the people motivated instead of creating rules. The employees are passionate about they learn, which is the motivation to keep the learning path.
50% of the employee
One of the best ways of learning is helping another person. The people may help each other because they are mates, the end of the day they will learn from each other. There is happiness when we share a good time with someone, just be happy that you have accomplished something. Now we are strengthening collaboration this way.
The people are free to choose the challenges to solve, and they can read books, watch videos, research on the internet, talk to the mates, or ask help to the mentors. There is no standard here for learning, and each one will find your way. They are in charge of their success in progressing the challenges.
Self-motivated employees will improve their skills through the challenges and will receive experience in exchange for this. Each problem-solving delivered, unlocks the next one, and it’s getting harder and harder. This gamification model allows all learning to be fun and stimulate the people passion, persistence, and motivation to get to the next level.
We don’t have classes, so each person has its own pace, and his achievements are individual.
Summing up
It is just a briefing of what we can do to build a great company culture, and there is a lot of hard work to make this happen. Good companies provide a pleasant environment where people feel safe. There is an exchange between the company and the employee. There is a relationship that needs to last and will grow.
