Companies expansion and center set up plans

We have started with a question from a VP of HR. “Should we consistently and aggressively push our employees to keep learning new skills and be trained in new digital products?- Does that not create a stressful environment.” This question is a bit surprising on the surface but has a very deep meaning. All of us want to learn new things. It is a given in the knowledge economy. But at the same time, we also like a routine with familiar tools and platforms and disrupting that cannot be handled easily by all resources. Back in the 90s, when we had to switch from Word perfect to MS word, many people reported “learning and adaptability” issues. I was a supervisor at a computer lab, and this was one of the top complaints. To answer the question, we looked at some research around what constitutes true long term happiness (may mean short term stress). We stumbled upon the fascinating research done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. – A Hungarian American psychologist. Csikszentmihalyi became a happiness researcher because of the adversity he faced growing up. He was a prisoner during World War II, and he witnessed the pain and suffering of the people around him during this time. As a result, he developed a curiosity about happiness and contentment and developed a detailed thesis around happiness. The summary of his work is as follows:

Although we crave time for passive leisure, people engaged in watching television reported low levels of contentment. Csikszentmihalyi’s systematic finding is that the activities that yield the highest for satisfaction with life require the successful performance of challenging tasks. These moments are encountered as frequently in work as outside it, and they constitute the state of mind which Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow.

This shows that regardless of how employees feel short term about learning, Human resources need to understand that learning new things will always be short term challenging and many times stressful. We may put in some best practices to handle short term challenges, but the quest to learn new things cannot stop.