Employee training is an easy thing to overlook. You could miss out on a whole lot of business success if you don’t train your employees. To stay at the top of their game, your employees need to be skilled in all the latest techniques, up to date with the most recent legislation and the laws that affect your sector and engaged with their work.
You need to motivate your employees to push themselves forward and strive to develop new skills and smash their targets. You need to invest in employee training within your company. This is the only way to create a culture that encourages the pursuit of excellence.
Employee Training Benefits
Without employee training, organisations can’t keep up with change, meaning their strategies will fail and their profits will fall.
Training your staff unlocks their potential, improves their skills and gives them the confidence to make a difference. Training also improves employee morale – another important ingredient in business success!
1. Help employees work more efficiently
The people in your business need to learn new skills if they’re to become the future leaders in your teams. On the way to that goal, employee training lets them work on their existing skills. The more skills your employees have, the more efficient the workforce becomes, making fewer mistakes and getting more done faster.
Someone with diverse skills can do lots of different tasks and move more easily into other roles. These effects all add up to the same result – a measurable increase in productivity and profitability.
2. Keep Your Competitive Edge
You need to act fast to keep up in this crazy world. You need employee training to make sure your people are equipped for that new piece of software or that exciting new product you’re releasing.
Your competitors are doing the same thing and you need to be faster than them if you’re going to snatch the lead. That’s why fast and adaptable training programs are super-important.
3. Improve Innovation
Once you’ve got your market edge, you need to stand out and make a real difference. You need a collaborative culture to make that a reality. Let everyone share their ideas on an open forum.
This an important part of employee training in itself, but it also gives the employees the full picture of your industry. Once they know the rules, they can artfully break them and turn the ‘can’t be done’ into the ‘wish I’d thought of it first’.
4. Ensure Compliance with Regulations
Compliance training is a necessary evil of employee training. Nobody likes it. It’s boring, it’s dry and there are just so many other things your employees would rather do. At least that’s the reputation that compliance training has earned.
The big secret that nobody wants you to know is that there’s no reason for it to be boring. In fact, if you try to make it more interesting, more interactive and (dare I say it) more fun, it’ll actually have an even bigger impact. If they enjoy it, your employees will race through their compliance eLearning, giving them plenty of time to spend on more interesting topics!
5. Reduce Attrition Rates
Most people leave a job because they don’t think they have enough of a chance to grow. Employee training creates these opportunities and shows each person the paths that lie ahead.
When they have that, they can make plans, they can get excited about new ideas and they can feel more positive about their work. It’s for this reason that employee training improves staff retention. Think of the time you could save if you didn’t have to constantly train new staff!
6. Develop Future Leaders
As old leaders leave, experienced employees need to be there to take their place. Employee training is about developing people and helping them reach their full potential. Not everybody will want a managerial role, but those that do need to have the right skills.
Training lets you grow the talent pool and make succession planning a lot easier. A social learning platform also lets you capture knowledge from all users. This ensures that, in the future, whenever leaders do move on, they don’t take all of their intellectual capital with them.
7. Get a Better Return on Investment
Did you know: organisations that invest just £50 extra a week on training see increases in profits almost twice as fast as those that don’t raise training budgets?
Investing in a new training program can seem scary. It’s a big risk to spend thousands on a solution, and simply hope that it generates a return. The key is to focus on your organisational goals – what do you want to achieve?
Whatever it is, you’ll need everyone behind you, which makes an engaging learning platform absolutely essential. The more people who use your LMS on a regular basis, the better chance you have of making an impact.
8. Improve Morale
Training your employees shows them that you care enough to invest in them. Seeing that you’re willing to do that makes the employees feel important, and that just boosts their motivation.
Imagine what it must be like to work in an organization that doesn’t offer adequate training. Something like that would sap your commitment and stop you performing to your peak.
Make sure you have an engaging training program in place and give your people something to smile about!
Employee Training Tips
That’s a small sample of the benefits of employee training. There are lots more gains to be had, but how can you get the most from the training programme? There’s no magic key to an effective training campaign, but here are a few pointers to remember.
1. Remember your Organisational Goals
Make sure you know what your business needs are and what problem you’re trying to solve. Try to address the skills gaps that are stopping your business from getting where it needs to be.
2. Make it Measurable
Pick a specific goal you want to achieve and make sure you can attribute a number to it. Whether that’s a percentage in refunds, the number of pencils you’ve ordered or rates of absenteeism, you need to be able to show that your training is making a difference.
3. Deal with Skills
Don’t try to impart knowledge – try to improve the skills of your employees. Make this the focus of your training initiatives, but let the employees share the knowledge they have and make sure they have easy access to anything they need to know.
4. Find your Experts
Subject matter experts are at the heart of any successful training initiative. Make sure you have a mechanism for identifying them. Once you know who they are, let everyone else know, and they can get the recognition they deserve.
5. Train Better Trainers
Finding experts is one thing. Just because Joe Schmoe knows lots about setting up a lathe cutter, doesn’t mean he has the teaching skills to share his expertise. Training people is a skill in itself and it’s a worthy place to invest your time.
6. Understand that Everyone is Different
People learn differently, they like different things and they hate others. Do what you can to cater to all preferences by trying new approaches to old content. Keep it interesting and you’ll be better able to hold everybody’s attention.
7. Make it Engaging
To get the best results from your employee training, you need to make your people want to learn more. It’s easy to tell yourself that your training fits the brief, but if it doesn’t pass the engagement test, nobody will want to use it.
8. Focus on Collaboration
At least 20% of workplace learning comes from interacting with colleagues. That’s twice as much as your employees will learn from any formal learning you produce. Make your training as social as possible. The time you spend on making this aspect work will have a much better return than merely creating content.
9. Invest the Learners
Why bother with training, right? There’s enough to do in the working day than taking training modules. If you want to get better results, you need to blow that myth out of the water! Show your learners that the training is worthwhile and emphasise the benefits wherever you can.
10. Ask for Feedback
Your people are the best advisors when it comes to improving employee training. Asking for their feedback is a great way to improve your future training initiatives. What’s more, it also improves organizational culture by showing everybody that their opinion matters.
11. Training isn’t a Moment in Time…
Keep reinforcing the training. People tend to forget most of what they learn if they don’t have the chance to recall it. Take the long view with your employee training and don’t spend all of your time producing huge modules. Break them down into smaller pieces and release them over time.
What is the Future of Employee Training?
It’s not a question of whether you should train your staff. The real question is can you afford not to train your staff? Any training is useful, but not all training is effective.
The learning technology industry is buzzing with activity. LMS providers are looking at new, more exciting ways to bring the training experience into the digital age.
- Learning Management Systems of the future focus on engaging the employees – not just reporting on their logins.
- Advancements in personalisation ensure that the training content is tailored to the needs of each employee.
- Social functionality lets you encourage a culture of learning where knowledge sharing and communication are central elements.
- Game mechanics make the experience more alluring.
- Mobile learning technology helps to get just-in-time learning to the right people when it matters most.
Employee engagement is crucial if you want your employee training to have a lasting effect. By making sure your employees are engaged in their training, you will see impact in your organisation. Traditional learning platforms don’t have what it takes to get a return on your training investment. You need an Engagement Engine!
Find out more about improving your employee training by downloading your own Engagement Engine Workbook!
