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Celebrate L&D Success: How to recognise and reward workplace learning

Today continuous learning at work is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Not only does it help organisations keep up with big shifts like AI, it helps strengthen employee morale and commitment while boosting productivity.

But to successfully foster continuous learning, the concept needs buy-in and engagement across the whole organisation. Using ‘command-and-control’ tactics to ‘enforce’ learning are ineffective and counterproductive. But capitalising on employees’ motivation to learn in the workplace and rewarding learning through recognition can create a virtuous cycle of constant learning and development.

In short: celebrating success should be a key part of your organisation’s learning strategy. Not only will it help individual interventions stick – it will also help learning become a cornerstone of your culture.

9 minutes

Written by The Access Group.

In this article, part of our series on how L&D can help employees Do the Best Work of their Lives, we set out positive, affirming strategies to create that virtuous cycle of continuous learning at work. Discover what they are and how to implement them now.

The case for continuous learning throughout the employee lifecycle

Gone are the days when you could simply hire someone with the right technical skills and expect them to keep up to date through incremental improvements. With the advent of AI many executives expect current core skills have a much shorter shelf life. Connecting learning strategies to every step of the employee lifecycle helps mitigate the risk of skills decay.

But it’s not just skills that need maintaining and developing. The pandemic prompted employees to spend more time working virtually and increased mandatory training and compliance requirements. Current geopolitical volatility means organisations must expect regular regulatory changes – making regular compliance training the norm.

L&D leaders must be careful, however, to avoid ‘training fatigue’; 58% of HR professionals were concerned about training fatigue or overtraining among their employees in 2023. Fortunately, the best ways to mitigate the risk of training fatigue are also the best ways to weave continuous learning into the organisation’s DNA. They include:

Tapping into employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to learn;
Celebrating learning success regularly and visibly across the organisation and beyond;
Offering tangible and social rewards for learners, whether they are co-located or remote;
Getting leadership involved as learners themselves.

celebrating success should be a key part of your organisation’s learning strategy

Fueling the Motivation to Learn in the Workplace

To engage employees with learning, L&D can use two different types of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic.

Harnessing Intrinsic Motivation

Employees experience intrinsic motivation to learn in the workplace when they find training meaningful, appropriately challenging, or aligned with their values, interests and aspirations.

The key aspects L&D should use to harness people’s intrinsic motivation are:

Giving learners autonomy: When learners have the autonomy to select their own development paths and have the resources to choose the right learning materials for them, they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to engage with and complete the learning.
Promoting mastery: Although upskilling and reskilling are facts of the future, people are still intrinsically motivated by developing mastery over a subject or skill. Tap into this motivation by helping employees see how they’re improving over time, for example, by using tech that automatically maps progress onto individual development records.
Offering appropriate levels of challenge: appropriate levels of challenge are tasks that stretch employees’ skills, allow them to grow their mastery and confidence without becoming overwhelmed.
Providing purpose: Connect training to the bigger picture and purpose of the organisation. Making sure employees feel their activities are connected to a larger purpose inspires intrinsic motivation at work.
Sparking curiosity: Reward learning with the opportunity to acquire more skills: researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer demonstrated that employees experience higher satisfaction and engagement when they have the opportunity to learn and explore. If your learning management system has the functionality to autosuggest learning content, you can direct employees’ curiosity to drive even more learning.

Harnessing Extrinsic Motivation

While intrinsic motivation drives individuals to prioritise their own goals and aspirations, extrinsic motivation can be used to drive the organisation’s strategic learning goals.

To tap into extrinsic motivation, L&D can adopt the following approaches:

Use social rewards for learning

Social rewards - positive reinforcement provided by other people – are the original extrinsic motivation. Social rewards include praise, recognition, and attention, linked to universal social needs such as belonging, acceptance and respect. When used strategically at work, they can boost employee engagement, foster a sense of community among colleagues, and help facilitate better performance. Use social rewards to promote learning by:

Encouraging managers and leaders to celebrate and reward learning progress regularly – in team meetings, staff newsletters and via intranets;
Gamifying digital learning: creating quizzes, monitoring learning streaks (something that popular language learning apps like Duolingo excel at), enabling comments and reactions for learning progress, and sharing employee leaderboards helps direct employees’ attention to learning;
Enabling and encouraging employees to share their achievements outside the organisation: witness the popularity of celebrating certifications on LinkedIn.

Harness the power of recognition

Ensuring employees are recognised for their learning efforts is key to keeping them engaged. Beyond social rewards, L&D can use tech to recognise and reward learning through awarding badges, micro-certifications and so on – and crucially, making learners’ progress visible and easy to celebrate. L&D can also use employee recognition programmes to offer tangible rewards. Recognising employees’ growth and highlighting their achievements across the organisation helps strengthen people’s personal brands, reinforcing their own desire to learn. Signalling individuals’ expertise to the wider business can also promote social learning as others wish to learn from recognised experts.

Leverage leaders, leadership and non-financial rewards

McKinsey found that praise from immediate managers, attention from business leaders and opportunities to lead projects or task forces were more effective motivators than financial incentives. L&D can show leadership that promoting learning is a cost-effective route to greater performance.

Learn and Earn Rewards: Tangible Incentives for Development

Many organisations choose to use employee recognition programmes as extrinsic drivers for learning and development. Incentives typically include:

Digital badges/credentials;
Vouchers or merchandise;
Social rewards such as learning leadership boards;
One off, extra instances of paid time off;
One off cash bonuses;
Educational stipends: Additional learning budgets unlocked after completing initial programmes
Educational sponsorships: offering to pay for a marquee qualification such as an MBA for high potentials who have demonstrated commitment to learning.

For employee recognition programmes to succeed, the rewards on offer must be relevant and meaningful. The process of acquiring these ‘learn and earn’ rewards must be fair, transparent and equitable too. A recognition and reward platform that can be integrated with your LMS solves the second point – if your reward platform works on a points-based system, connect it to your LMS to map learning progress into points that can count towards tangible rewards.

Remote Learning Rewards: Engaging a Distributed Workforce

With globally distributed workforces and the popularity of hybrid working, L&D must ensure remote learners are rewarded as regularly and transparently as their co-located colleagues.

This represents an extra challenge for L&D, as remote learners face additional barriers to learning:

they can miss the social connections that facilitate learning in physical environments;
they can feel isolated which saps motivation to learn;
it is hard to maintain focus in long remote learning sessions, especially those where most participants are in the same room and remote learners are just participating via video;
any technical difficulties experienced will decrease engagement with learning.

So, designing learning experiences that account for these realities and offering remote learning rewards are even more important. The right technology can help here – digital rewards and credentials are an obvious method, but there are other tech-driven solutions that help drive remote learners’ engagement:

making sure content is translated or subtitled into all spoken business languages;
leveraging your LMS’s recommendation engine to autosuggest new learning;
redesigning classroom-based learning into engaging, multimedia eLearning content for remote learners;
use tech-enabled social rewards to promote digital learning – think learning leadership boards and celebration posts as well as digital certifications or badges;
set up virtual peer learning communities to foster connection, accountability and mutual support between participants;
ensure your employee recognition and reward programme works in lockstep with your LMS for all learners, no matter where they’re located. Making sure every learner is recognised and rewarded consistently across the organisation demonstrates the learning and development strategy is equitable and fosters a sense of fairness.

Leading the Learning Charge: Leaders as learners

How leadership and management role model learning themselves has a powerful effect on how much their employees prioritise development. Previously leadership’s only visible touchpoint with L&D may have been reminders to complete compliance training or allocation of personal development budgets. Today leaders must be participants and promoters of learning – not policemen.

To help leaders and managers make the shift, L&D can:

Clarify the value of learning to the business, and the performance and retention benefits to teams.
Share evidence that leaders who are also learners are viewed as more transparent and trustworthy, especially in uncertain times.
Reassure leaders that the time commitment for them is minimal. A leader can engage in learning at a much lighter level than employees and still make a huge impact, by virtue of being a leader.
Use technology to underpin and facilitate leaders’ commitment to learning. Make sure learning tech and internal comms systems are connected so that any learning or certification updates are communicated – and can be celebrated – in real time, by leaders and colleagues alike. The attention from leaders and peers not only highlights the learner’s progress, it also highlights the learning content, encouraging others to engage with it.
Help leaders adopt and role model a growth mindset. When leaders show they enjoy challenges, strive to learn, and want to acquire new skills they role model how they expect their teams to behave, helping develop the desired culture of continuous learning.
Get their sponsorship and buy-in: L&D acquired the ear of the C-suite in the pandemic – now is the time to leverage it. Sponsoring learning and allocating time and resources for development helps cement learning’s value to the organisation. Leaders can show support through something as simple as book recommendations all the way to something as significant as sponsoring a new LMS.

How to recognise and reward workplace learning and make it stick

The following five steps will help your whole organisation recognise, celebrate and reward learning in the workplace, making continuous learning a cornerstone of your culture.

Leverage intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to highlight the importance of learning in your organisation;
Use social rewards in learning by putting plans in place to celebrate individuals’ progress and inspire others to commit to their own development;
Consider investing in an employee recognition programme or connect the employee recognition function with your LMS or intranet to offer social and tangible rewards for learning;
Make sure learning content is accessible to distributed workforces, and make sure it’s easy to visibly celebrate everyone’s learning progress either via your LMS or internal communications channels.
Engage leaders as learners themselves. Make it easy for them to visibly role model their own learning and easy for them to show appreciation for others’ progress.

When continuous learning and development become part of your culture, your people are better prepared to adapt to whatever is happening externally. As simple as it sounds, recognising and rewarding learning in the workplace is a key step to creating an agile, resilient workforce – and therefore an agile, resilient organisation.

Ready to embed and celebrate a culture of continuous learning in your organisation and help your employees do the best work of their lives?