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.
Related content
Related content
Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.
After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.
What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.
For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.
AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.
When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.
- What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
- Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
- What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
- What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?
For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.
Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point
One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.
A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.
In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.
The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.
The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.
Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.
Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.
Licensing as a way to buy time and insight
In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.
The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.
Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.
AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature
Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.
Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.
Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.
At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.
That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.
The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.
A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.
What this means for leaders
Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.
The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.
Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:
- What you believe that the market does not
- Why that belief creates defensible value
- Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it
Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.
Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.
In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.
This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.
This article was originally publish on Rotman Management
IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.
The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.
In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.
Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.