Training your employees is essential for a number of reasons. When you offer your employees training opportunities, you help them to develop their skills and knowledge. You ensure they keep up with developments in your industry and in your organisation. You can even help to improve employee retention by providing them with useful training. However, your training needs to be valuable to your employees if you want it to work. Many employees complain about mandatory training that isn’t relevant to their roles or just feels like box-ticking.
You have to offer a training experience that really delivers value to each of your employees. Whether you have mandatory training that all staff members need to complete or optional training to allow people to advance in their careers, your training should be useful and beneficial.
Deliver Relevant Training
Ensuring your training is relevant to your employees is a basic thing that you should be doing, but so many employers seem to get it wrong. A lot of employees complain about getting stuck in training sessions that don’t really seem connected to their roles and feel like a waste of time. One issue might be that the training is relevant to everyone, but they don’t understand why. Alternatively, it could be that some employees really don’t need to undergo this training. When you’re designing learning and development for your employees, you need to make sure it’s really necessary and that you clearly communicate how it benefits them.
Use the Right Training Platform
The right technology can make a huge difference if you want to deliver your training effectively. It helps you to keep everything organised and deliver learning from one place. If you want to whip your training materials and delivery into shape, an LMS system for business is a must. A learning management system gives you a platform that you can use to create, administrate and distribute training materials, whether for whole departments or for individuals. With greater control over your employee training, you can make sure that you create a valuable experience for all of your employees.
Collect Feedback from Employees
Listening to feedback from employees is always important if you want to get things right. Instead of just guessing or reading papers about what employees want, you should speak to your own employees about what they want from their learning and development. What training methods do they prefer? What topics do they want to cover and what skills do they want to learn? Ask them for feedback after they have undergone training to find out what worked and what needs to be improved. Continually asking for feedback can help you to ensure you keep improving your training.
Provide the Right Feedback to Employees
As well as asking for feedback from employees, you should also make sure you’re giving them the right feedback during training. When you have to provide them with feedback on how they are performing, your feedback needs to be helpful and constructive. For example, if you assess them part of the way through their training and they get something wrong, you need to explain why something is wrong and how to improve, not just tell them it’s wrong. You can make sure that your feedback is encouraging and helps employees to improve, and that it’s relevant to what they’re learning to do. There’s no need to nitpick at things they might not be doing to the letter if it doesn’t really have an effect on the end results.
Personalise Training for Individuals
You could deliver the same training to a group of employees without really making an effort to change it for each person. But personalising the training that you deliver can make it much more valuable for each person. They receive training that’s really relevant to them and you ensure your employees are learning new skills that they can really use. Before offering training to someone, it’s beneficial to know what they already know and where they might have gaps in their knowledge. What are their strengths and weaknesses and how can you balance them to create more well-rounded employees?
Show Them the Benefits
You hopefully know how employee training is going to benefit you and your company, but do your employees really know what they’re getting out of it? If all they know is that they have to do it because they’ve been asked to, it’s not going to make them very enthusiastic. And if it’s optional training, getting them to do it at all is going to be tricky. You have to let your employees know how training is going to help them in their personal development, how it might give them new opportunities, or how it might even make their jobs easier.
Offer Mobile Training
Being able to learn on different platforms can help employees to learn in the way that they want to. Offering your training through a mobile app or platform can be a good way to encourage people to complete some training. When they can do it on their phone or another mobile device, they might do it during their commute or whenever they might have some time and not much else to do. Evidence has shown that employees are more likely to use their own time to learn if they can do it using mobile devices.
Make It Social
Creating a more social experience around training can help to make it a more valuable experience. Instead of your employees bonding over not wanting to do the training or thinking it’s useless, you can get them to feel more positive about it. Offering food and drink is one classic way of getting people to attend training sessions, but it’s also a good way for people to socialise and find the training more enjoyable. You can create training activities where people can work together and help each other to learn new material. Even when learning online instead of in person, they could socialise or even compete on your learning platform.
Give Employees Time to Train
While employees might be willing to do some training in their own time, most won’t want to spend a lot of their free time completing training for work. It’s effectively still work if it’s necessary for their roles, so you can’t expect everyone to give up their free time to get it done. Ensuring they have time to complete training during their working hours means they’re getting paid to train instead of losing their personal time. Making sure they have the space to train can be useful too. They might benefit from having a quiet space to work on their training or somewhere they can train with other people.
Tie Training to Advancement
Employees can find training more valuable and motivational if they can clearly see how it’s going to help them progress in their role and career. Showing that if they complete certain training requirements, they can take on more responsibilities and have a shot at promotions can make training a much more interesting prospect. If your employees can see that there is a clear path to advancement and that they can realistically follow it, they can get more out of the training that they complete. They see that training directly leads to better pay and more valuable skill sets. It can encourage them to stay with your company for longer too.
If your employees don’t find training useful, valuable, or enjoyable, you need to rethink how you do it. Delivering the right training to the right people and in an engaging way is crucial.