How to Raise the Bar for Employee Training and Development

Employee training and development programs do much more than merely boost professional knowledge. A well-planned employee training program can transform organization productivity, member job satisfaction, and employee wellness. In this post, we will show you the simplest way to create a training program that serves as a permanent catalyst for employee excellence.

Learn the 3 Steps to Promoting Employee Excellence

Your organization’s ability to make employee excellence the rule rather than the exception depends on the strength of workplace culture, the quality of your educational resources, and the consistency of employee performance tracking. Let’s take a look at the steps required to optimize your employee training program’s value to your organization.

1. Develop a Workplace Culture Focused on Employee Wellness

Employee wellness is a key element of employee excellence. Why? Because the positive work-life balance that promotes employee wellness and job satisfaction is invariably connected to time and project management. Great time management and management skills lead to higher productivity levels and ultimately a healthier fiscal outlook. Providing training in “soft skills” like conflict resolution and interpersonal communication can also promote less stressful work environment and contribute to greater job satisfaction for team members. Research indicates that satisfied employees are significantly more productive than those who are not. In addition, creating a training program that provides value beyond developing work-related competencies (such as training in stress management) empowers staff to live better lives, making them more likely to feel an overall sense of wellness and satisfaction in the workplace.

Look at your LMS as an employee relationship management tool.

2. Conduct an Audit of Your Educational Resources

Ask yourself:

• Can I easily add multimedia elements such as video, webinars, podcasts, or interactive animations to my training program’s curriculum?
• Do I have a broad range of educational tools available for each segment of the training program? Can I mix and match quizzes, activities, and offline tasks as needed according to the complexity of the subject matter?
• Is it simple to monitor trainee performance as they progress through the program?
• Can I drill down from an aggregate view of trainee assessment scores to view results learner-by-learner?

If the answer to any of these questions was “no” than you should consider a learning management system (LMS). An LMS streamlines content management by bringing all of your employee training and development documents and instructional tools onto the same platform, making them accessible to your team through a single login panel. With the right LMS, you can monitor learner performance and instantly identify those employees in need of extra help to meet competency benchmarks. An LMS will also allow you to add new content like video to online activities designed to promote knowledge retention. Your LMS allows you to create interactive activities that reinforce core concepts while giving you valuable data on learner outcomes and content impact.

3. Use learner outcomes tracking through an enterprise-grade LMS to maintain scalable performance excellence

With an LMS that offers integrated performance tracking, you are never in the dark about your employee’s competency gaps or skillset strengths. Educational interventions can happen before performance issues become long-term patterns that impact team productivity. With an onboarding experience managed through the LMS, performance tracking can begin even before your new hires start their first day. That means individual knowledge gaps can be addressed immediately and skills training can be customized to the needs of each team member.

Ask yourself:

• Should I rely on employees to volunteer information of competency issues or use a learning management system to intervene and remedy knowledge gaps?
• Is my current training process designed to accommodate a diversity of learning styles and knowledge gaps?
• Am I able to easily monitor employee training knowledge retention over time by department, teams, or individual employee?
• Are learners able to augment their training with enrichment content that is easily accessible online or via mobile?
• Is it simple to view evidence that employees are engaged with specific content at any point during the training period?
• If your employee training program isn’t running on a system that helps you streamline performance monitoring, optimize data management, and simplify content creation, then it is time to seek an enterprise-grade LMS.

5 Tips to Raise the Bar in Employee Training Quality

1. Model employee excellence standards through immersive content in the LMS (using video, audio, and other high-impact components that can show real-world situations where standards must be applied)
2. Make ongoing training self-paced and easily accessible to employees.
3. Enact performance tracking that works seamlessly with existing HR management systems
4. Use performance monitoring to support dedicated employees and empower struggling performers (not just as a tool to look for productivity or compliance issues)
5. Connect educational intervention with performance monitoring so that team members in need of specific support can get immediate help during a performance assessment.

WestNet Learning transforms your LMS into a productivity engine, offering tools that promote a workplace culture of excellence. WestNet Learning support enables you to scale your employee training and development program without enduring a trial-and-error phase as your educational needs change. Let’s raise the bar together. Connect with us for a free demo.

WestNet Learning is an all-in-one LMS solution to easily train employees, increase employee productivity, and address safety needs. With customizable eCourse curriculum bundler, analytics, reporting, certification, and re-certification tracking will help manage staff and stays on top of what matters most.

If you would like to learn more about how to engage and train your employees with efficiency so that you may increase your training course completion rates, feel free to reach out and schedule a 1-on-1 strategy session