With teams being increasingly physically distant and distributed, employee engagement in training, which has always been a challenge for T&D professionals, takes on new dimensions that require new approaches to deliver great training programs.
The technology that pervades and intensifies work processes shortens the shelf life of skills, demanding constant and rapid employee upskilling.
Recruiting new team members is expensive, leading organizations to focus on talent retention. Access to upskilling training is becoming a sought-after employee benefit and a powerful talent attraction tool. Therefore, offering relevant training and maintaining people’s engagement with it is essential.
Here are a few best practices for enhancing employee engagement in training:
Always mobilize leadership support
Manager support is critical to encouraging employee engagement in training. A Gallup survey shows that only 34 percent of workers feel strongly that someone at work encourages their development.
Managers at the most successful organizations encourage development by being lifelong learners themselves, creating a culture that values, expects, and rewards continuous learning.
Organizations also can capitalize on the popularity of leaders by asking the most influential to create content to promote programs, like recording a video to launch a new training program. The leader touts the program’s benefits and inspires people to participate.
Reflect lifelong learning in their individual goals
Incorporating lifelong learning into an individual employee’s annual goals is an excellent way to motivate employees to learn new skills continually.
However, avoid setting goals that are only about achieving a certain level of proficiency. Instead, also set a goal that encourages participation in a lifelong learning process.
For example, people might set a goal of taking a half-hour class each week rather than a goal of achieving a particular level of competence in a specific skill.
Focus on real-world applications
Employees will be more engaged in courses and training opportunities they believe are relevant to their career goals and can be applied right away.
Focusing on current real-world concepts is critical to increasing employee engagement in training programs.
Providing employees with clear data on how the training will benefit them and help them do their jobs better is also important.
Send ongoing nudges
Employees are bombarded with information in their email boxes and other media. Their day-to-day work lives often revolve around reacting to urgent situations rather than thinking ahead toward more strategic goals.
In their daily work environment, employees will sometimes overlook training goals. You can help employees stay on track with their training goals by sending ongoing reminders via email, Slack notifications, and other means.
Get and share other learner’s stories
Storytelling can personalize a message. Sharing learners’ success stories enables others to visualize themselves as reaching their goals through learning.
The stories also validate the messages that management is sending about the benefits of lifelong learning.
Employees also are often eager to read the stories of other learners. After all, everyone loves a good story.
Customize at the team and individual level
Some training courses can benefit everyone. Power skills like communication and time management skills are examples.
However, companies should be wary of too much-centralized learning. Harvard Business Review says that companies too often develop learning activities around what is possible or what they think would be useful rather than on what actually will help the employee do a better job. Taking the time to design more practical and specific courses is worth the effort.
Employees are more engaged in courses that meet their specific needs, either as individuals or as members of a particular team. Customized courses that help fill current or predicted skill gaps also benefit the organization.
Make it fit into people’s busy schedule
Most employees already work more than 40 hours a week. They are also busy in their personal lives. Indeed, they get busier every year.
If companies want employees to participate in a culture of lifelong learning, they must design them so that employees can fit them into their busy and sometimes asynchronous schedules.
Microlearning allows employees to fit courses into small bits of time, especially when courses are available on mobile devices 24/7.
Make sure people find the grounds to implement what they learn
Employees want to learn information that is useful. Companies should set up scenarios that allow them to implement what they’ve learned as soon as possible.
Applying new information and skills helps reinforce them. Also, once employees find that they can apply their learning, they will be more enthusiastic about continuing to learn.
Choose multimedia
People have different learning styles. The main three styles are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. An effective lifelong learning program will use multiple media so that each learner can find training programs that match their style. Examples are videos, readings, and live interactions such as role plays.
Encourage a learning community
Many employees are more engaged and collaborate more if they are part of a community of peers. Peer communities can encourage members to keep learning and sharing knowledge.
Consider creating a Slack channel for employees to recommend and discuss learning opportunities, bring related content, and share spontaneous testimonials.
Assign a Program Champion
From the experience we have supporting organizations in 150 countries, this is THE most important factor to employee training engagement and success.
The best program champion is passionate about lifelong learning and understands how the plan can fit business needs, keeping track of the most important training metrics to apply these best practices when learner engagement lowers, in time not to hurt the expected goals.
They also should liaise well with the training and development department so that they can advocate for courses students may suggest or need.
Summing Up
n the context of a rapidly evolving and geographically dispersed workforce, enhancing employee engagement during training has gained paramount importance. The influence of pervasive technology on skill obsolescence calls for constant upskilling, while organizations are driven to retain talent by offering sought-after upskilling opportunities.
To boost employee engagement in L&D, mobilizing leadership support and setting personalized goals to emphasizing real-world application and leveraging multimedia is very important.
By fostering a learning community and assigning a dedicated program champion, organizations can navigate this transformative landscape, driving enduring engagement and success in employee training.
Voxy provides relevant and innovative language training for employees, built around real-world business content.
Employees also learn languages while learning other skills such as diversity and inclusion, technology trends, or leadership. Our courses work on all devices to fit into employees’ schedules and work with all learning styles.
Contact us for a 15 minute assessment to find out more about our skills-based language training solution.
