Develop a staying, growing, thriving culture
HR Daily Advisor editorial...In a rapidly changing work environment, organisations grapple with retaining quality talent amidst an exhausted workforce, shrinking budgets, and an uncertain economy. The desire to stick around is decreasing among employees.According to Gartner, employee attrition averaged around 20% in 2022. The evolving landscape of employment—characterised by a surge in remote working, the loss of critical knowledge due to an aging workforce, and a demand for purpose-driven roles—underscores the need for a fresh approach.In fact, purpose has arisen as an important driver for employees because it connects individuals to their companies.Traditional development systems no longer suffice. Instead, companies must democratise and personalise learning at scale, fostering a culture that aligns with both individual and organizational purposes. While 83% of business leaders agree that development is important at every level, only 5% of businesses have implemented development initiatives at all levels.As jobs and careers undergo transformative shifts and the lines between global and local blur, businesses must adapt. The significance of a purposeful learning culture, its impact on retention, and practical strategies for its implementation become paramount.It’s not just about equipping employees with skills. It’s about giving them a reason to stay, grow, and thrive.Here are three steps for implementing a learning culture throughout an organisation...
Step 1: Aim For Personalisation in Corporate Learning
The world of work progresses at a breakneck speed. To keep up with change, employees and teams need to consistently reskill. Though investments in learning and leadership development are at an all-time high, 70% of employees surveyed by Workplace Intelligence feel unprepared for the future of work.One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to learning. Personalisation enables learners to focus on areas where they need the most improvement, allowing for targeted skill-building and efficient use of time and resources. This requires a blended and modular approach to give all learners access to training and materials at the right moments to unleash their potential.Sadly, many learning programs prioritise ease of implementation and compliance, employing a rigid design suited for traditional learning academies and generic perspectives. Modern learners demand flexibility, including full access to quality materials, opportunities for exploration, and learning from others.Democratising materials and personalising learning at scale across verticals can be challenging. However, adopting a more self-directed, human-centered approach is vital for the future of learning. Embracing technology to make learning tools and experiences accessible and relevant to everyone empowers workers to cultivate their skills and foster a stronger connection to their companies, reducing turnover.
Step 2: Create Ownership of Learning and Reward Curiosity
With a learning culture, every member of an organization must lead by example. It’s not enough to 'sell and tell' a learning strategy. People—including the executive team members—need to know the 'why?' behind learning.All must feel a deeper commitment to the outcomes and impact of knowledge improvement. Individuals must perceive and experience the rewards of investing time and energy in learning.For instance, when everyone develops their business and technology acumen, the path to digital transformation becomes smoother. Corresponding productivity gains benefit both employees and the business.The cause and effect of learning on business results must be highlighted and rewarded.Rewarding curiosity goes beyond praising and promoting those who show eagerness to learn. It also involves cultivating an environment that nurtures critical thinking, where debates and voicing opinions are encouraged, even if it leads to disagreement. As an added advantage, transparency in learning and development fosters psychological safety. Employees understand that they are encouraged to enhance their skills and won’t face penalties for applying newly acquired knowledge, even if the outcomes are unexpected or undesirable.Rather than fearing excessive innovation, employees will be motivated to present novel strategies. Ultimately, this strengthens their connection with their work and the organisation’s culture.This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a balanced perspective between learning, testing, and relearning. An organization’s strategy and culture need to be mutually reinforced by means such as finding an equilibrium between accountability for progress while allowing the experience to be rich in positive, authentic coaching and feedback.
Step 3: Design Learning Portfolio Offerings Rich in Community, Experiences, and Content
More than 50% of employees who work remotely at least some of the time say they feel disconnected from their colleagues. Compounding this feeling, many learning strategies actively scale out human connections through technology. A well-balanced learning and development strategy will stimulate a learning culture when it optimises for the right mix of three key things: community, experience, and content.
- Communities are the best way to deliver lasting change because they create a connection between people and accountability
- Experiences are one of the most effective ways to disrupt mindsets and create the capacity to change
- Content is the foundation for guiding and reinforcing perspectives and ways of working
Getting this balance is critical and should be the top priority for any learning organisation.One method of determining if participants are finding meaning from a learning portfolio is by measuring the impact through employee engagement surveys and similar vehicles. Together, the vehicles should measure three categories: the head, the heart, and the hands. In terms of the head, measurements should identify if the learning unlocks people’s intelligence so they can contribute to the company’s mission of outstripping the competition.When it comes to the heart, the measurement should reveal whether employees are happy. As for the hands, the measuring device needs to indicate whether training has prompted productivity and performance.Most companies accept that training their people is essential. However, far too many leaders haven’t changed their learning and development focus in years. That’s a liability in a modern labour market where talented individuals are quick to switch jobs.The better way to ensure more retention and higher engagement is to invest in purpose-rich training that benefits all parties and creates a dynamic learning culture.
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Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.
For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.
The limits of unlimited (coaching).
Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?
In practice, quite a bit.
When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.
Three patterns emerge:
- Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
- Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.
- Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.
The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.
The relationship is the lever.
Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.
When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.
The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.
Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.
1. Consistency
The foundation everything else is built on.
The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.
A stable coaching relationship works differently:
- The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
- The client stops performing and starts being honest
- The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions
Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.
2. Continuity
What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.
Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.
What continuity makes possible:
- A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
- A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
- Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on
That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.
3. Completion
The most underrated principle of the three.
In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.
A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.
- Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
- Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations
For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.
Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)
The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.
Practical design decisions:
- Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
- Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
- Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization
- Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work
- Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one
Questions to pressure-test your design:
- Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
- Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
- Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?
Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.
Three decisions that changed everything.
Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.
We would become our own Customer Zero.
While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.
So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:
- No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
- IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
- Don’t wait for certainty.
We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.
What if we started this company today?
Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.
Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.
The team asked a simple question:
"What if we were to start our company today?”
That question started the flywheel.
They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.
The messy middle.
At first, the team was underwhelmed.
The early reports were blunt:
“Not good with math.”
“Poor graph capabilities.”
The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.
This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.
Each cycle produced something:
- A sharper scenario
- A faster build
- A more powerful simulation
The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.
When the diamond appeared.
Then something shifted.
The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”
And what emerged wasn’t incremental:
- What used to take weeks started happening in days.
- Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
- Clients became self-serving.
- Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.
This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.
It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.
95% adoption in eight weeks.
Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.
BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.
And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.
So we expected resistance.
Instead, something surprising happened.
In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.
It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.
This moved on its own. Why?
We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.
The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.
- Joy
- Excitement
- Pride
As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.
There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.
And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.
It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.
Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.
The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?
In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.
La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.
Ed è lì che si perde valore.
I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.
Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.
“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”
In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:
- Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
- Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
- Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
- Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
- Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso
Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.
Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.