Top 5 Tips on Learning More With Less

Small businesses share their best advice on how to build a learning culture with limited resources

If despite your best efforts, you’re finding it a struggle to keep learning a priority, you’re not alone! Many small business owners often find that their desire to learn or to create a learning environment for their colleagues is weighed down by budget and time constraints.

In order to help those who want to learn and build a learning culture, we asked small business owners for their top tips on how they manage to promote a robust learning culture without breaking the bank. Read on for their 5 great tips!

#1. Make learning a priority in your company’s mission statement

Mission statements are essential to your business regardless of the size of your company. A mission statement demonstrates your company’s values and guides the direction your company takes.

Research by Iterable shows that in 2020 - a difficult year by all measures - 90% of UK marketing leaders doubled down on their brands’ mission and purpose in a bid to stay connected with customers and build consumer trust. This brings home the importance of knowing and communicating the purpose of your business.

Furthermore, research from Deloitte shows that ‘mission-driven’ companies have 30 percent higher levels of innovation and 40 percent higher levels of employee retention.

Given how significant mission statements are to companies, a powerful way to promote learning in your organisation is to include it in your organisation's mission statement.

This is what Abby Ha, Co-founder & Head of Marketing at Cloom, has done. “I started by creating a mission statement for the company that included the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’,” Ha says. “I repeat that mission statement to remind my team why we are doing what we do; it defines what we stand for. I also created an official policy for continuous learning.”

#2. Learning (& teaching!) by doing

Many small businesses conduct informal training for their employees. These types of training are often overlooked because they are ‘hidden’, as observed by Heather Short, a researcher of learning in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Short notes that much learning in SMEs is socially situated and appears to take place as part of their everyday, operational business. 

Therefore, if you can identify the informal learning that takes place as part of your employees’ jobs, you can also make the process and outcomes of this learning more overt. 

This is practised by Ralph Serverson, owner of Flooring Masters, who says they “remind everyone regularly that learning happens every day whether we realise it or not. This makes everyone much more intentional about their learning.” Additionally, Severson “makes certain that anyone looking to learn has access to people who can teach them. Management is taught coaching strategies, and employees are trained to teach one another in every way possible.”

Similarly, RHEI-MAID, a small business with family employees, recognises that informal learning is one of the main ways employees learn. For Mary Rhei, President of RHEI-MAID, ‘teaching by doing’ and ‘explaining your reasoning’ are key components of this training process.

Rhei says, “Show employees the process by doing, integrate the employees and hand over the process. In concert with teaching, explain your reasoning. This not only shows your competence, but addresses the goal for your method.” Rhei adds that employers should “be open to suggestions” from employees.

#3. Set aside dedicated time for learning 

We all know the benefits of cultivating a habit of continuous learning to both individuals and organisations. However, we often find that the urgency of work-related tasks trumps the time we know we ought to spend on learning.

One solution to ensure we do learn is to set aside some time especially for learning. Research by LinkedIn shows why we should do just that. Compared to light learners (who spend less than an hour a week learning), heavy learners (who spend more than five hours a week learning) are 39% more productive and 74% more likely to know where they want to go in their career. 

Ha puts this into practice in her company Cloom. She says that her employees “have dedicated times set aside for learning.” In addition, her employees have a goal of “spending time working on one personal growth project (relevant to business) each month.”

#4. Curate relevant learning content

Curating shared resources for employees is a popular tip. The idea is to gather and organise relevant resources from both online and offline sources, and help your employees access them all on one platform or in one place. 

According to Ben Lamarche, General Manager at Lock Search Group, “There is already plenty of excellent information online so there is no need to reinvent the wheel and create new content.” Lamarche breaks down how they curate the most relevant learning content, as follows:

• What we’ve done is identify key in-demand skills sets and competencies and then leveraged the existing content on trusted learning platforms to meet employees’ learning needs.

• We match the training content to the skills and competencies and compile the links and resources on our learning management system (LMS) for easy access. 

• The LMS is regularly updated to keep information accurate and relevant to organisational goals.

#5. Go virtual

Online learning has been around for a while. However, the pandemic has sped up the offer and adoption of virtual training. This has actually been one of the silver linings for small businesses looking for more affordable training options.

Mike Germade of Empire Abrasives puts this succinctly, “Covid turned a lot of conferences and events into virtual gatherings. We have been trying to take advantage of these ever since joining Ad World last year.” 

Germade highlights the cost and time benefits of attending online events: “It's way more affordable than going to an in-person event. And you can head back to your desk during breaks or when there aren't any sessions you want to join at a particular time.”

Final thoughts

In summary, regardless of whether you’re running your company’s training programme on a shoestring budget or you’re an L&D professional whose learning budget is under constant scrutiny, the above tips can help you build a stronger learning culture at your workplace.