An effective team environment is made up of many elements and forces, including strong communication, organization, and leadership, but the most important thing it's made up of is people. The people you work with can make or break your personal work experience as well as the success of the entire company. People are the lifeblood of business and need to be treated as such.
The most productive workers are constantly learning and implementing their lessons to get better. And the most productive workforces are environments where learning is fostered, encouraged, celebrated, and supported.
Here are two areas where you can easily foster a learning environment at work: within your employees (helping them learn about themselves) and within your processes (allowing room for failure and innovation, both of which stem from the same gift of empowerment).
Self-learnings
Think of a recent workday when you were truly engaged. Maybe you were doing something you loved and you fell into that wonderful, mysterious state of flow where time flew by as you immersed yourself in an activity.
When you emerged from that flow state, did you just move on with your day? Maybe. Or maybe you reflected on it and thought, "I can't believe how fast time flies! I must have really enjoyed that."
In that way, you learned something about yourself. You learned that you enjoy doing that task and that when certain elements were organized around it--maybe you require total quiet, or music playing, or an extra large coffee within arm's reach--you could do it well. This is all data you can learn from.
Part one is reflecting on it; part two is acting on it. Learn from the experience--reflect on what it means and what you can do next time to create such a productive environment for yourself--then implement those insights.
For example, if you learned that a certain type of music gets your creative juices flowing, don't just accept that and move on. The next time you need to do creative work, play the music.
An environment where you are empowered to learn about how you work best and to implement those findings is one type of learning environment. Not everyone is able to adjust their surroundings or the context of their workspace to best suit them. Some people need to be in an office even though that's not where they perform best, while others are required to work certain hours that don't jive with their most productive hours. If this is important to you, create (or find) a workplace where employees are empowered to do their best work in a way that suits them best. If you're a leader, think of it this way: As long as the work is getting done and people are happy, the way it gets done is an area where you can be flexible and empower your team members to learn about themselves and implement those learnings in ways that will help them grow on a positive trajectory.
Innovation and Failure
Many people will tell you they are afraid to fail at work. They might have good ideas, but if those ideas are not welcome, they won't voice them. They might have a viable solution to a major problem, but if the environment has not been nurtured such that they feel comfortable sharing their solution, they will be afraid to do so (and worse, the problem may go unsolved simply because the company culture was so toxic, creating a vicious cycle that will be very difficult to break away from).
Leaders, make your workplace more harmonious and supportive. Here's something you may be surprised to know: You can still hold your employees to high standards while not being afraid of failure.
Shocking, right?
Many managers (notice I said managers, not leaders) think they need to be extremely strict with their rules because they know the one way to succeed and nothing else will work. They think that's the only way for their team to prevail. Well, news flash, that level of suffocation is not helping anyone. Providing specific training and guidance on specific tasks can be necessary for execution to be performed well, but that's not where growth happens. And you have to balance both.
Give your team the training and oversight they need to perform tasks appropriately. But then also give them room to grow. Growth happens when employees know the higher level pieces, such as the strategy and the vision and the goal, and then they have room to come up with new ideas (or choose the way they achieve those goals, as mentioned in the previous section).
For example, if you know A always leads to B, and you make your team always perform things in line with A, you have a pretty good idea you'll yield results like B most of the time. But what if you tell your team members your expectations and give them some strategic guidance, and then they start doing things like C, D, and E? And what if some of those lead to results like F, G, and H, which are so much better than B? You'll never know what more you could achieve if you keep doing the same thing. You can't do the same thing over and over again and expect new results. Doing A will lead to B. But doing C, D, and E may lead to F, G, and H, and those new results could be better than B. You'll never know unless you try.
And guess what? Sometimes those results may not be as good as B was. But based on what metrics? Maybe result F didn't give you as high an ROI as result B, but maybe instead, the pathway to result F taught you a few things about your team's working style, or exposed some gaps in the process, or built confidence in your employees, or suggested a new hypothesis you can test in a future "experiment."
Note: If something new works, you might call it innovation. If it doesn't, you may be tempted to call it a failure. Don't. Instead, call it a trial or an experiment. A term with uncertainty built in will remove the fear around failure and instead nurture a feeling of curiosity toward work that employees can use to succeed in new and exciting ways.
The conversations around this experimental process will help you and your employees figure out what it all meant and what to do next. Don't just let "failure" happen then go back to the A-->B process.
Discuss it:
What did we learn from it? (The most important question!)
Why did it work?
Why didn't it?
How did you feel while you were doing it? Why?
What could we do differently next time?
How can we make it work?
Asking future-thinking, positive questions that assume success and guide people toward the way to achieve it will foster a learning environment that empowers people and yields better results than what is typical or expected.
Balance steady, ongoing task completion with innovation for the best results. Get things done, but also give employees room to grow. Give your employees the tools they need to succeed, then give them space to experiment with the way they use those tools. Talk about strategy, vision, goals, and expectations, then empower your team members to think up new ways to achieve those goals. Encourage curiosity, and frame some projects as experiments to remove the fear of failure (and the repercussions we assume it carries with it). You may be pleasantly surprised with what you find.
This is how you construct a learning environment that will empower employees to succeed in new ways and produce results beyond your wildest comprehension.
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