You already know that there's more to improving employee course completion rates than simply issuing a round of stern reminders. You want your employees to complete their courses because they're inspired and engaged. Although fostering employee engagement with employee training may seem challenging, your efforts only have to be well-structured to work. In this post we'll share practical ways to help your team to get the most out of employee training through self-paced learning.
How Do You Motivate Employees to Complete Training?
The answer, according to recent research, is engagement. As an HR leader you are highly engaged with your organization's mission and are always on the lookout for tips on how to get more out of your time and budget.
When you find content that resonates, you keep reading. When you find a tip that makes you more productive, you put it into practice, and you share it with others.
An employee training process should be built to engage even the team members who believe there is nothing new to learn. How? By connecting with your staff's interests in addition to delivering role-appropriate training.
Regardless of their job description or years of previous work experience, every employee can benefit from learning more about:
Time Management
Use quick tips on how to manage personal schedules and smart ways to get the most out of the workday to show employees that you want them to be productive but not overtaxed. Making sure that your employees know the difference between being "busy" and "productive" is critical to maintaining performance excellence over time.
Work-life Balance
Acknowledging that your employees have a life outside work and offering pointers on how to keep personal time sacred shows your team that you care about the human side of human resources. Promoting work-life balance can boost overall team wellness and boost job satisfaction levels.
Stress Management
Regardless of the size of your organization, your team members will experience stress on a regular basis. Many will find it hard to talk about. The best way to help employees stay on track during stressful times is to integrate stress management tips into your employee training content.
Conflict Resolution
Unless your team is 100% robot, you will have conflicts that don't make it to the mediation room before they impact the workday. Providing simple intervention and conflict resolution techniques to help employees defuse potentially disruptive differences of opinion is a smart way to maintain a productivity-conducive workplace.
Take Another Look at Employee Training: Content is Still King
Just like in K-12 education, employee training often puts an emphasis on memorization instead of knowledge retention. Focusing on memorization means that students simply make quick mental notes of facts and figures and keep them in mind until the next quiz, but none of it becomes real—they aren't truly engaged.
When it comes to OSHA compliance, for example, 70% alignment with health and safety regulations is a very poor score. Your employees must be motivated by the presentation of the material as well as the content for concepts to "stick" and keep them interested.
Here are five quick tips to make sure your content is powerful, engaging, and inspiring course completion and high performance:
- Focus on engaging content to improve knowledge retention. Be sure to connect workplace concepts and skills to real world situations that employees can apply to other areas of their lives.
- Track learner progress actively to stoke engagement and identify employees experiencing difficulty grasping key concepts based on assessment scoring.
- Use an LMS that makes engaging video, animation, or audio content easy to add to activities and assessments. Employ multimedia components to make challenging concepts easier to grasp.
- Provide comprehensive training content that your employees can review at their own pace. Both advanced and beginner learners should find value in your content.
- Select an LMS platform that offers exceptional technical and content development support. As your needs change it is essential that you have a technical partner that can help your employees get the most out of your LMS content.