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 akin to getting a teenager excited about a driving safety handbook, 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.
According to recent studies, 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 the following:
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 even when workloads fluctuate.
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.
With a flexible learning management system, it’s easy to add quick, useful tips to training content. Whether it’s an embedded video or a downloadable e-book, your employees will appreciate and engage with content that helps them improve as people, not just as employees.
Take Another Look at Employee Training: Content is Still King
Remember high school chemistry? If you were lucky, it was an exciting class that challenged you to explore the building blocks of the universe and made you appreciate the complexity of the world around you. If you weren’t so lucky, it was confusing and perhaps a bit tedious.
How could something as magical and mysterious as the nature of the known world be boring? Because many teachers, victims of circumstance, attempt to cram as much knowledge as possible into the minds of disinterested, easily distracted teenagers.
Just like in K-12 education, employee training 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.
While it’s unlikely that a “C” in high school chemistry will keep anyone from living their best life as an adult, you don’t want your employees to get a “C” in the concepts that they need to maintain peak performance and limit risks.
When it comes to OSHA compliance, for example, 70% alignment with health and safety regulations is a very poor score. Memorizing the outline of key concepts isn’t enough if you want an employee to do better than average when it comes to putting company principles into practice. 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 (like time and stress management skills).
- Track learner progress actively to stoke engagement and identify employees experiencing difficulty grasping key concepts based on assessment scoring. Use the LMS to offer enrichment content and support to struggling employees before knowledge retention issues during training impacts job performance.
- 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 and to help learners focus during portions of training that may be tedious.
- Provide comprehensive training content that your employees can review at their own pace. Knowledgeable employees may be alienated by remedial content and team members who need a refresher course might be intimidated by a course that glosses over introductory material. Both types of employees may not finish the course if they can’t connect with 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.
At WestNet Learning we’ve helped companies develop scalable training solutions that inspire employee excellence for more than 20 years. We partner with you to simplify HR training innovation.
WestNet Learning is an all-in-one LMS solution to easily train employees, increase employee productivity, and address safety needs. With customizable eCourse builders, analytics, reporting, certification, and re-certification tracking, Westnet Learning will help you manage staff and stay on top of what matters most.
If you’d like to learn more about how to engage and train your employees with efficiency to increase your training course completion rates, feel free to reach out and schedule a 1-on-1 strategy session.
