4 Ways to Help You Rethink Your Approach to Employee Training

Employee training covers so many different components, and as businesses think about ways to keep their employees happy but also keep them up-to-date, utilizing the best tools to stimulate employee learning can be difficult. Employee training is something that we need to pay more attention to, but we also need to recognize there is more than one way to skin a cat. What does it take for us to rethink our approach to training employees?

Adopt Online Training

Many organizations are forgoing the traditional classroom-based technique for learning management systems (LMSs), and many corporate LMS suppliers provide online learning solutions because they are easier to fit in with the workload. When employees can access training whenever they need it, this doesn’t interrupt their workflow so they can retain a high level of productivity. An LMS can also boost retention rates partly because employees have more control over the learning process.

There is a place for traditional classroom-based training, but it can be very expensive due to the cost of bringing someone in and making sure employees are clued up in specific subject matters. When you throw into the mix additional costs like the venue, the course material, and the cost of employee downtime, it’s clear to see that online training is a far more cost-effective approach.

Incorporating Learning Into Daily Work

Employee training is not just about learning in classroom sessions or online courses. When we design online activities, we should think about the less obvious ways to incorporate training into a working environment. There are more overt methods such as a skills swap session, which can help employees to prepare themselves for a sideways or upwards career move.

There are also less obvious ways to incorporate learning into daily work. This can include personal reflections at the end of the day. We all learn something new every day, but a working day can be replete with so many stresses and strains, many of us feel we just need to get to the end of it. When we have an expectation that an employee needs to showcase something they’ve learned throughout the course of the day, this can boost engagement.

If an employee is able to pay a bit more attention to one aspect of their workload, this could reap dividends in the long run because they are able to understand something they didn’t do right or have a greater insight into ways they can work better. We have to remember that employee training is not necessarily about learning a process or the theory behind something, but it can also be about giving them greater autonomy to work smarter.

When we incorporate the notion of learning throughout the course of the day by inviting employees to reflect, this can promote personal learning and we can prioritize continuous learning, rather than expecting a training session to arm our employees with everything they need.

Shorter Training Sessions

Long training sessions are cumbersome and exhausting. We’ve all experienced some form of “Zoom fatigue” with long meetings where we have to be on our A-game. This is why shorter sessions, not just in education, but in every aspect of our business, can make a significant impact. A day-long course sounds great in theory, but we have to incorporate lots of breaks, and we can also find that some employees naturally retain information better than others.

If you can shorten a day-long course into half a morning by providing the salient points but also giving your employees a number of different methods to get the information into their cranium, you may find there is better engagement.

Covering the essential knowledge can be a great way to keep those retention rates up and the learning fatigue down. You have to make sure your employees are fresh, which is why creating and curating a course that doesn’t have superfluous words and has the “TL;DR” approach to learning can stimulate modern employees who scour social media and have shorter attention spans, which, let’s be honest, are the vast majority of us!

Bite-Sized Chunks

Logically following on from shorter learning sessions, if you can divide the content into more manageable chunks and cover these in shorter sessions you will more likely have greater engagement. One of the biggest problems, when we go on a day-long online course, is that we don’t necessarily know what we’re in for. A long course that goes up to 8 hours, or even longer, can be exhausting.

A combination of a shorter session while also breaking down a session into more manageable chunks can be invaluable for businesses because they can benefit from increased productivity, while also ensuring that employees have the opportunity to go away and think about what they’ve learned. Learning is not just about what happens in the classroom or on an e-learning course, but it’s about having that time to go away and reflect, which is something that typical school environments do not promote.

There are a number of amazing resources to learn things better, including this one which includes having short “brain breaks,” where effectively people shut down, so their brains can consolidate information. We have to think in terms of how people learn as well. People don’t just learn by reading but they might be auditory or kinesthetic learners, and crafting a course that covers all of these bases is critical.

It is a very massive subject to break apart, but learning is something that comes with many different hang-ups. Lots of people hate the idea of learning because they hark back to school, but this is why you also need to make sure that you are creating a nurturing environment. This goes back to the notion of trust amongst employees, which should be firmly embedded into the company culture. If you can support your employees that have just come into the business alongside new employees throughout the training process by providing some of these components or rethinking how your employees take information on board, you may see a greater degree of engagement, but you may also see your productivity increased as a result.