Entrepreneurs and business owners, like all executives, are tasked with keeping an eye on business growth and ensuring that employees’ skills and values remain in line with the emerging needs of the organization. When business owners notice that performance is deteriorating, they realize this can quickly have a negative impact on revenue or customer satisfaction.
Typically, business leaders may look to traditional training as their first line of defense to move performance toward the desired outcome. When the training incorporates doing, a key feature of experiential learning, it will create more engagement and result in a greater impact on the business. The knowledge retention rate for employees who go through traditional learning is only five percent, whereas the retention rate from experiential learning can be as much as 90 percent. There is power in experiential learning because it can change behavior, engage staff and impact organizations for the long-term.
Here are three reasons why experiential learning can be used to boost a company’s performance:
1. Experiential learning mirrors reality.
Experiential learning is neither a simple activity (like the classic “trust fall” you see at team-building retreats) nor an ultra-realistic simulation. This learning approach falls squarely in the middle — which is why it’s so effective. In an experiential learning exercise, participants solve a real problem, typically one that mirrors a challenge they face in the workplace, by using the skills they apply on the job every day. This bridges the gap between theory and practice.
While experiential learning mirrors reality, it does not replicate it, as simulations do. Instead, an experiential learning exercise takes the form of a themed scenario that serves as a metaphor for the challenges that participants face in the workplace. Participants may not recognize the parallels between the experiential learning exercise and their workplace realities at first, which is by design.
By…