Sustaining Growth: How to Create an Organizational Learning Culture

Anyone that has planted a garden knows that the tricky part is not kickstarting the growth but sustaining the plants so they grow to fruition. In business, short spurts of growth are common but keeping a business on the up and up is a much harder task. One way to ensure that a business’s growth is continued is to ensure the growth of the employees. A successful learning culture creates an environment that presents endless potential for the people in it and thus the business itself. Here are smith & beta’s five steps to creating a progressive and sustainable learning culture.

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Six Years Strong

smith & beta is now 6 years into our research of the capabilities and ways of working at agencies. We just released our 2018 Talent and Transformation report and we're excited to share with you what we found.

Our business at smith & beta has always been focused on the development of people walking in the doors each day. We believe that if a company focuses on the current talent, what they know today and should know in the future, it can make all the difference to the bottom line. But some leaders aren’t familiar with talent development. It’s new. It feels unmeasurable. It seems foreign compared to hiring a few new experts. It’s a mindset and strategic shift. Yet we know talent development works. We also know that experts don’t scale. Often those superheros we hire land at the new job only to find that no one at the company understands them. They get siloed into a back room. They are change agents without support. They eventually leave. It happens time and time again. Take a minute to consider your budget for hiring experts this year or even a single leader and then compare to your training dollars. Is there a big difference? Do you operate as “training is nice to have” but not required? If so, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to scale and distribute capabilities beyond a few people at your company. Digital is not a department. Digital is shared knowledge, common language and collective understanding. When we design talent development programs, we work with industry leaders directly to lead content design. They are the experts. They know what should specifics should be covered. They walk in the room and own the conversation with employees. Below we’ve included a great workshop to get started this year.

2017 Greatest Hits

Welcome to the Greatest Hits 2017.Each year, at smith & beta, we publish our “greatest hits” for classes, workshops that we completed. This year, we noticed a preferential trend for content that focused on mindset development. No big surprise given how important mindsets, behaviors and habits are for learning in the workplace.

According to smith & beta’s 2016 report, 62% of industry professionals say their clients are asking for more advanced digital work from them and 43% of respondents said they were unprepared to provide more advanced work. When a company does not have the knowledge and talent to give their customers what they expect in the current technological climate, they fall behind and often cannot catch up.