Last Updated on Thursday, 8 July, 2021 at 10:47 am by Andre Camilleri
Instilling a culture of continuous learning
Continuous investment is critical to every business. Whether it’s in systems, products, infrastructure or people, investment is key to sustained growth and long-term returns. It creates the energy required to drive a business forward, to get creative and innovative. Simply put, it injects new life into the business, the oil that keeps that engine running.
GO plc is a sterling example of why investment is important, both for the business and for the economy as a whole. As a technology company, GO is naturally inclined to constantly invest in its technology and the systems and infrastructure that support it.
In fact, it is considered to be one of the largest investors in Malta’s digital infrastructure, with figures exceeding €100 million over the years. It has to in order to serve the growing and changing needs and expectations of its customers. However, behind the technology and infrastructure, there are great teams of people who work tirelessly behind the scenes.
“At GO, these three pillars; technology, infrastructure and people shape our investment strategy, because we know that each of these pillars is dependent on the other. Whilst we have made huge investments over the years in both technology and our infrastructure, our people remain our greatest asset, so we need to invest in them too, now through our recently launched GO Academy,” says Emma Gatt, Senior Manager – People & Culture.
Launched in April this year, the GO Academy is an outcome of journey GO embarked on in 2020 to become a purpose led organisation.
“The Academy has three goals, applied across three types of learning to match those goals,” explains Emma. “The first goal is to build the skills we all need to deliver our strategy and to do this, we have priority learning programmes that focus on three pillars namely Purposeful Leadership, Customer Centricity, and Digital Excellence. The second goal is to ensure that the training is technical and functional in a way that helps us all do our jobs better and achieve our career aspirations.”
“The final goal is to build a learning culture where everyone is inspired to invest in his and her own learning, and to be celebrated for doing so. We leave it up to our people to define their own learning goals by utilising the Learnerbly platform, a leading edge digital learning platform that together with a personal learning budget and a series of webinars, will provide a treasure trove of opportunities for our people to indulge their curiosity, on subject matters such as how to make learning your superpower, how to be a healthy and happy remote worker, and more.”
The GO Academy offers access to a new virtual library with all training recordings, one pagers, articles and supporting materials that are made available to all teams who can easily access all this material at any time of the day.
Emma Gatt points out that although the Academy was launched barely three months ago, the initiative has been welcomed with a resounding success.
“We have received incredible feedback and response on the pillar learning programs we have launched so far and have also achieved 94% of our targeted Learnerbly take up. I believe that part of the success comes from the fact that the Academy is being offered to everyone at GO. It has given our people the opportunity to follow double the learning content made available in previous years and more than 80% of people have so far attended GO academy learning programmes, such as our first pillar initiative which is related to customer centricity.”
The GO Academy encourages a blended mix of learning in order to adapt to each individual, and each course is made up of both specific technical and soft skill training aligned to GO’s purpose and values.
“Training is top-notch and we are bringing expertise from outside the Company to deliver bite-sized, high quality, easy to access learning journeys curated in line with GO’s mission. We are also striving to develop a culture where our leaders and subject matter experts support, lead and celebrate this learning.”
After the very successful first three months, GO is now planning initiatives for the Academy’s second year, which will support the business objectives linked to its purpose, to help its people do their day-to-day jobs better and to continue to build the important culture around learning at GO.
“We believe in the power of learning and learning becomes more powerful when it is ongoing. Our people are the ones with the creative minds, innovative and driven to continue building and driving the technology forward. So as one of GO’s crucial pillar, we know that we need to keep investing not only in their well-being but also in their technical skills and interpersonal abilities,” concluded Emma Gatt.
