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How to create a positive learning environment

Ongoing learning and development is important for everyone working across social care. Find out how you can build a positive learning environment in your organisation.

Show that you value learning

Make learning and development a clear priority for your organisation by embedding it within your organisational values. If your team can see that the organisation values learning and development, they’ll value it too.

Ensure your staff know they’re not only allowed but in fact encouraged to make time to focus on their learning and development, and to ask about opportunities for training and progression.

Having your senior staff role model the importance of learning and development by sharing what training they’re doing can also help with setting an environment that promotes learning, as leaders set the tone for the whole organisation.

Set goals

Encourage open conversations among your team about their individual goals and ambitions. It’s important that staff know they’re able to speak up about their development plans and that they’ll be supported by their managers.

Regular one-to-ones between managers and their team members are a good opportunity to set goals and check in on progress, identifying where the organisation can help to support people to meet their goals.

You can also set organisational goals that promote learning and development for everyone. For example, a certain amount of time spent every month on learning and development.

Champion diversity

For people to thrive and succeed in any learning environment they need to have a sense of belonging. Staff need to feel that they belong in the organisation to be comfortable with asking for and embracing opportunities for development.

Adopting an inclusive leadership style is really important in building a positive workplace culture where everyone feels they belong.

Inclusive leadership means adapting your approach to meet the needs of different individuals and teams.

To support everyone to be able to learn and progress in their roles, it’s also important to ensure that learning and development opportunities are accessible to people from different backgrounds and with different needs. This may mean ensuring that training resources meet accessibility needs or it may be providing additional support or mentoring to encourage people from minoritised backgrounds to take up learning and progression opportunities.

Think about different learning styles

People learn in different ways, both formal and informal and have preferred ways of learning. It’s important to understand different learning styles, so that you can create the right opportunities and give the appropriate support.

Learning occurs in different settings including daily activities, observing others and supervision. Good learning environments blend practical learning with opportunities for training and qualifications

As well as formal training, knowledge and skills can be developed through mentoring or buddying, bespoke schemes to support staff in specific roles and through apprenticeships. Likewise, continuous professional development can be delivered through group knowledge transfer sessions and professional development time.

Start from day one

During induction, employers play a pivotal role in setting the tone for the culture of the workplace, so make sure the value of learning is made clear from day one.

Speak to new starters about your organisation’s learning and development goals, and discuss their own development goals.

Support them from the get-go with a robust induction programme which helps them to settle in and feel confident in their roles from the start.

Allow for mistakes

Establishing a positive, blame free culture is critical for building a positive learning environment.

A compassionate culture where staff feel psychologically safe to make and admit mistakes without judgement is vital in allowing people to try out new ideas and learn new things.

It’s also important to encourage staff to use mistakes as a learning opportunity for improvement.

Celebrate success

Make learning and development something to be proud of by celebrating staff achievements.

This may be through schemes such as employee of the month or annual awards.

Or it could be supporting staff to put new skills to good use through skills sharing sessions with the rest of their team, to finding ways to develop their roles to incorporate new skills and knowledge, allowing opportunities for progression.

Find more learning and development support with our ‘Keep learning to build your future’ spotlight.

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