Ways of Supporting Learning Environment

Ways of Supporting Learning Environment

In an environment that is quickly changing, employees and managers should value how reliable and fast they learn instead of what they know. One of the most effective approaches to ensure businesses become successful in the future is making it a learning organization where everyone is provided with an opportunity to solve problems proactively. Learning encompasses various aspects such as creating meeting structures, organization charts, creating key performance indicators, and highlighting problems. According to Blanc (2019), organizations can start by refocusing and resetting expectations on a single product, customer type, one market, or wide metrics. The second step entails making challenges and progress visible in a manner that is compelling. Self-learning organizations are guided by the belief that people will identify a problem and adopt various approaches to solve it.

One of the organizations that have established a sustainable learning environment is the Coca-Cola Company. A major ethos of the company is keeping its employees happy and healthy. Notably, Coca-Cola provides a rewarding working life to its employees are adopts an environment where workers can improve their performance, adopt good skills for their improvement and attain their career goals (Carberry et al.). Through the provision of training on-the-job learning and coaching, Coca-Cola ensures that every individual who works with the company has adequate resources to learn more and develop their careers. The management also focuses on ensuring that employees have fun as they work. The key objective of the company is making it a great working place where people are motivated and inspired to the best they can be.

Implementation of Learning Processes and Practices

During the implementation of a learning process, Blanc (2019) notes the initial step should be deliberating on fundamental issues such as EBITDA and employee attrition through holding questions and answers session and company meetings. In addition, he notes that CEOs should be honest regarding the success of the organization, its failure, and be candid about what they want to achieve. Employee engagement is one of the techniques that Coca-Cola uses to implement the learning process. The success of any organization depends on committed and motivated employees. This implies that the management of the Coca-Cola Company should feel that the employees play a vital role in ensuring that the organization achieves its goals and their needs are understood..

Coca-Cola has various ways of determining the level of engagement among the employees as well as their job satisfaction. These include initiating a constructive dialogue with workers representatives and undertaking employee surveys. The company has realized that for it to retain the best people, it has to invest in learning and development. For example, Coca-Cola has established development programs since it is committed to creating learning opportunities for all employees (Albuquerque, Koskinen & Zhang, 2018). The peak performance is one of the programs that evaluate the performance of employees and rewarding them based on the outcomes. Coca-Cola University is a major learning opportunity that the company has created. This is a virtual global university that provides learning capabilities, including leadership, team management, and strategic planning, and other activities cutting across the company.

Alignment of Learning Activities with Sustainability of the Organization

Formalizing self-learning in the culture of an organization is a major strategy that will make the process to be continuous instead of it be seen as a one-step program. As noted by Blanc (2019), when his organization was eliminating waste ruthlessly, they tried to defend things that promoted learning. For this to be achieved by Coca-Cola should promote and keep personal development and training budgets in addition to training people on various aspects to ensure it becomes easier for everyone to learn. For example, the company should use the Plan-Do-Check-Act and Kaizen models. Through such frameworks, employees will be trained on how to make annual goals and quarterly goals that they will need to achieve.

Restructuring of Coca-Cola is one of the strategies that the company uses to improve its sustainability and competitiveness. For example, during the restructuring of the business model in the North America market, a common platform was required to share information among all bottlers. The company adopted the Coke One North America (CONA) solution that aimed at covering areas like reporting, procurement, finance, and human resources. During this time, the company had limited infrastructure for deploying required learning in the region. This created an opportunity for the Coca-Cola and bottling partners to create a reliable and support model of learning that would strengthen the new CONA platform.

In 2012, the role of creating the CONA learning and development strategy was given to Doug Teachey. One of the major tactics of achieving this mission was creating a common core learning and development team. The team ensured that 80% of the system would be under the management of bottlers, while the remaining 20% would be owned by each bottler based on localized training development.  A model that ensured a scalable training delivery was also established. As a result of the necessity to create hands-on and face-to-face training, the team identified a Super User model as the best opportunity instead of utilizing contact trainers. The Super Users were chosen from various field resources based on their skills and expertise.

The CONA team aimed at achieving an alignment of a global training development and performance support toolsets. Due to the smaller size of the systems before CONA, they lacked the capacity to initiate large-scale training and performance support. This made the CONA learning and development team to look for a strategic solution that would address the needs of the bottling network in North America. In addition, a shared curriculum was developed. The team established an activity-based curriculum that addressed the training needs of the broad audience.

Extent to Which Leadership Reinforces Learning

When a program is concluded, that is not the end of development, but it must be seen as the start. By providing regular opportunities to learn and practice skills on their bobs, employees are able to be retained (Rakhshan, Muhammad and Nosheen, 2012). When leaders and managers continuously reinforce their learners, for example, through various avenues of communication, the latter are able to change their behaviors. Taking action is a major approach that leaders should adopt.

Naturally, retention can be promoted by using instructional designs. Nonetheless, the use of examples is one of the key techniques that leaders should use to reinforce learning. This means that leaders should act as examples and train the employees on how to solve the problem facing them. Leaders and managers should aim at attracting candidates, driving performance, engaging employees, and maximizing the contribution of the employees to the firm. This can be achieved by acting as an active agent during the learning process. To promote true learning, the managers should also be involved in the training of employees and not leave the entire process on the jurisdiction of human resources and learning and development personnel.

References

Albuquerque, R., Koskinen, Y., & Zhang, C. (2018). Corporate social responsibility and firm risk: Theory and empirical evidence.

Blanc, S. (2019). How to evolve your company into a self-learning organization. Forbes.

Carberry, E. J., Bharati, P., Levy, D. L., & Chaudhury, A. (n.d.). Social movements as catalysts for corporate social innovation: Environmental activism and the adoption of green information systems. Sage Journals, 58(5), 1083-1127.

Rakhshan, U., Muhammad, L and Nosheen, K. (2012). Leadership That Reinforces Learning: A Comparative Study between Manufacturing and Service Sector Organizations of Pakistan. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, Volume 5, Issue 4 (Nov. – Dec. 2012), pp 28-30.