How to Make Learning & Development Work for Your Startup

Today, employees expect more from their employers than ever before. In addition to a paycheck and a fun work environment, an increasing number of employees expect their company to help them develop professional skills.

Data shows that professional growth is especially important to younger employees who have begun to enter the workforce. Recruiting agency Robert Half found that 91 percent of Gen Z employees evaluated professional development as one of the most important factors for choosing where they want to work. And other research shows that Millennials value learning & development (L&D) as the most important benefit after salary when selecting an employer.

Startups are battling for this young talent, and yet startups face several unique challenges for trying to launch L&D programs:

1. Startup budgets are tight.

With limited funding, resources gravitate toward product improvements and sales initiatives, leaving little left over for training and developing employees.

2. Startup PeopleOps teams are stretched.

While big companies have HR teams of dozens of people, startup companies often need to get by with a lean and mean PeopleOps team of one or two employees who are tasked with recruiting, compliance, employee relations, and a million other things.

3. Startup employees are busy.

Speed is the way of life. From rapid prototyping and product iterations to dealing with customers, suppliers, and prospective clients, there’s little time for employees to focus on learning new skills.

With all of these challenges, how can startups make L&D work?

It’s entirely possible to be a lean, fast-moving team and still also make time to upskill and develop your staff. These seven tactics can help:

1. Inject learning into the DNA of your company

Rather than viewing learning as a program, view it as a lifestyle. Encourage company founders, executives, and managers to share their favorite books, podcasts, and TED talks with the rest of the team. Create a company “learning list” of recommended content that is “on-brand” for your company.

Start a company book club, then encourage employees to share their bookish insights with their colleagues. Create a #learning Slack channel where employees can share recent lessons learned with the rest of their peers. All of these methods will help you bake learning into the culture of your company.

2. Talk about learning as a core part of the job

There’s a strong temptation for employees (and managers) to focus on what is immediately in front of them — putting out fires and tackling urgent projects while neglecting personal development. Before you know it, each employee has wasted hours of time doing something manually rather than learning a faster way. (Example: In the short term, it may be faster to learn how to manually add cells in a spreadsheet, but investing the time to learn the “SUMIF” function will save dozens of hours over the long term.)

You can counter this short-term mindset by emphasizing learning as a core part of each employee’s job. Set the expectation that everyone needs to constantly improve and learn new skills.

3. Decentralize learning

Although L&D may technically be owned by someone in your PeopleOps team, that person shouldn’t be the only one emphasizing learning throughout the company. Empower and encourage your managers to have development conversations with their team members and to actively share articles and other material that help them learn necessary skills.

For example, if one of your managers has been helping an employee develop public speaking skills, they could share a helpful article about developing confidence in public speaking and give that employee the chance to lead an upcoming team meeting.

4. Leverage first-class marketing tools to reach employees

Marketing teams have access to countless tools to engage with prospects and clients. But why should Marketing teams be the only ones to get all of the cool stuff? Many of those same tools are now available for PeopleOps teams to connect with employees.

Look for tools that can send mobile push notifications to team members to help them find relevant learning content and company-specific content like welcome guides for new employees, recorded training sessions, and recent company updates. PeopleOps staff and managers can also use automated tools to push content to employees on a recurring basis, such as weekly diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) material or monthly communication tips. Such tools help small talent teams have an outsized impact on the business.

5. Start with the biggest place of need

There will always be a million things you want to teach employees. You don’t have enough time or people to tackle every problem, so you’ll often need to prioritize the learning initiatives that offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

If you’ve promoted several employees into their first management roles, then you may want to prioritize new manager development. If you’re on a hiring blitz right now, then prioritizing new hire onboarding may be a good place to start. Just don’t try to boil the ocean right off the bat. Create a targeted plan that addresses the biggest, most impactful areas first.

6. Think remote-first for any training you build

More people than ever are now working remotely, and that trend will continue in the years ahead. Five years ago, when people thought about “training,” they immediately pictured a group of people gathered in a classroom, with a trainer up front next to a PowerPoint screen and a whiteboard.

That’s not what training looks like anymore. The shift to remote learning requires the adoption of a new set of tools. And yes, I’m talking about tools beyond just Zoom and Slack.

Consider using an online whiteboarding tool like Google’s free Jamboard app. Or record audio clips that can be sent out asynchronously to train your team about changes in your industry and keep your team informed about what each department is working on. Employees don’t want to sit in front of a computer watching slides all day on Zoom, so find ways to creatively engage your team members with new remote-first tools.

7. Take advantage of the wealth of available content

L&D used to be all about creating custom training content: knowledge base documentation, company-specific trainings, and custom slide decks. While those things are still important aspects of L&D, there is now more content available than ever before.

In 2018, cloud company DOMO found that over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day. In other words, there’s a good chance that the training material you need already exists somewhere out in the world. You may not need to create it — you can just find it.

Speed up your L&D process by sourcing content from elsewhere. It’s also helpful to broaden your understanding of L&D to include data organization: once you have the info, how will you help your people find it? Every minute you spend organizing your company knowledge base, intranet, and department communication could end up saving many minutes (or even hours) of collective time for your team down the road.

One of the greatest successes a PeopleOps team can have is to create a learning culture within the company. These seven tips will help you do just that — even on a tight budget, with a stretched PeopleOps team and busy employees.

If you’re able to put these tips into practice, you’ll be able to keep your current employees more motivated and engaged while winning the war for talent by attracting more incredible people to your team.