Imagine yourself as a leader of a thriving multi-million dollar business. You have a massive Return on Invesment (ROI), are always recruiting, and consistently acquire clients.

You’re acing it!

Nothing can go wrong – until something does. Without warning, a crisis hits and knocks your entire business down. Everything that used to work no longer works. Your company is at a crossroads. If we’ve learned anything in the last year and a half, it’s that circumstances like this are no longer just figments of our imagination.

With the onset of Covid-19, organizations were forced to take a hard look at their structure and processes and make difficult decisions to stay afloat.

We’ve seen countless ventures crumble while a select few thrived. Amid the global economic downturn, it’s the ones that continuously learned to adapt that found success.

Pivot or Perish?

Before COVID, we had a workforce dedicated to Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). The business was thriving. In March 2020, our company and the M&A landscape changed overnight.

Businesses were so consumed with simply surviving that all our existing clients put their investment plans on hold. M&A became extremely risky in a pandemic that seemed to have no end.

We knew we had to transition, but our team members lacked the experience and skills to do so. Our team was heavily trained to work in M&A, but the pandemic deemed those skills irrelevant. Management was completely blindsided and had no experience navigating a crisis as large as this.

A harsh lesson we learned at the onset of Covid-19 is that during a crisis, it’s either you pivot, or you perish.

How did we survive?

Instead of scrambling to make our current system work, we stepped out and explored the field. We sought ways to retrain and upskill the team to avoid redundancies as we shifted our business model. 

Our graphic designers broadened their creative skill sets, our copywriters adapted to training new hires, and a team member dedicated to clerical tasks and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) started strategic planning.

Many companies also found themselves in the situation we were in. As a team, we had to completely change our line of thinking, tap into our workforce’s undiscovered talents, and explore contemporary strategies. It was a cumulative effort backed by our team’s eagerness to thrive amid the crisis.

The takeaway? Incorporating continuous learning into the workplace culture and opening our doors to new possibilities allowed us to sustain our business and continue growing despite any roadblocks.

Learning culture breeds growth culture

As a leader with an obsessive thirst for learning, I knew that Learning & Development (L&D) would play a significant role during this crisis.

• A study says that a 10% increase in L&D translates to a 9% gain in productivity.
• Companies that focused on L&D have reported a 14%-29% increase in profit. 
• 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers (LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report).

L&D seems like a privilege that only multinational conglomerates can afford. Many executives believe you must pay for a massive program to build this learning culture. In the digital age, this is no longer the case.

There’s an infinite amount of resources available online. LinkedIn Learning offers different courses about a variety of business topics. If you’re resourceful enough, the whole internet could be your entire learning portal — with minimal costs.

And that’s precisely what we did. We leveraged the pause in our business to encourage learning among our workforce. We would immediately call for an L&D session if they were struggling with anything.

Fast forward to almost a year later, we are reaping the rewards of injecting a growth and learning mindset into our culture. We’ve successfully transitioned our business, built a comprehensive training portal and self-paced onboarding process, quadrupled our profits despite the pandemic, and are about to hire more than a hundred employees at the end of the year.

Creating a learning landscape

Sustainable growth

Sustainable growth is the realistically attainable growth that a company can maintain without problems. Beyond that, it’s all about surviving and being ready for what’s to come.

There are a variety of methods and strategies that you can apply to cultivate a learning culture. You might need to add more effort and determination as you explore new ways of thinking, but the rewards of doing so are equally gratifying.

Innovate

Don’t be afraid to launch new learning environments. Be bold in trying new platforms and encourage your workforce to develop ideas. Be nimble to adjust to not just a new set of tools but also a fresh pair of eyes.

Before the pandemic, our idea of learning was limited to in-person meetings. Today, we have custom-built our own Learning Management System (LMS) platform at a shoestring budget. We now have a robust suite of tools we have built in less than a year.

Purpose

This can be the most effective strategy to achieve sustainable growth. It understands how your people contribute to the bigger picture and lets them know why their work matters.

Allowing your team to see its impact empowers them to learn harder and work better. Purpose is a silent driver and leader for growth.

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“Leaders must continuously honor a growth mindset and invest in learning and development to hone a learning culture. A business that learns is a business that grows.”
_{Cybill Juarez, VP of People & Operations, Staffing Venture Capital}

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The shift to a learning mindset

Many business owners get blinded by growing their ventures at top speed. The faster, the better. But a quick pace does not guarantee success.

A business can shoot up and then get stuck midway. Some plateau and stay stagnant when leaders are not prepared for explosive growth. Unpreparedness turns the best of us into bottlenecks.

As leaders, we naturally wear multiple hats. Aside from investing in L&D and diversifying our skill sets, we must also accept that imbalance will be a natural price to pay to achieve business-driven goals.

This pandemic has taught us to look at all possible occurrences and risks—social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental—and be prepared for anything thrown our way. We need to learn to weather-proof our business for any kind of storm, which may take more significant amounts of investment in non-revenue-producing areas of the organization.

While there are many other parts to our story of triumph apart from learning and development, this relentless commitment to learning gave us the jumpstart to succeed.

When we breed this type of culture, we sustain not just growth but also individual performance. When combined, those individual successes lead to a substantial positive impact on the business.

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TeamRecruit is a global recruiting firm and RPO services provider with workforce solutions tailored to meet the continuously evolving needs of healthcare and technology companies worldwide. Partnering with global talent acquisition leaders, we deliver the talent you need from anywhere in the world.

We are dedicated to improving talent acquisition in every setting – one hire and one partner at a time. TeamRecruit provides outstanding client care, scalable and flexible service, guaranteed speed and efficiency, and a top-notch talent pool. We help companies uncover deep insights into their long-term talent acquisition goals with data-driven actions to maintain a competitive position in the market.

For more information, visit https://teamrecruit.com/meet-teamrecruit/

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