When you engage your employees in your training efforts, you give them the motivation to learn, and to use their new knowledge and skills to do their jobs better. Otherwise, your staff may tune out if they keep experiencing sessions that seem like a waste of time. If you’re serious about helping your employees to develop their skills and their careers, make sure you consider their interests and capture their attention. Try these 3 tips for getting them engaged.
Make your training interactive: Training should be an ongoing two-way conversation. When you’re trying to define your organization’s training needs, it’s important to analyze performance data, but don’t forget to ask your employees for direct input on what they need in order to excel. Offer training sessions that are interesting and fun by using a variety of tools and formats like games and videos, as well as question and answer periods and breakout discussion groups. Evaluate all your activities so you can stay up to date and keep improving.
Make your training personal: One-size-fits-all generic courses can be worse than no training at all if they’re too basic or have little to do with your employee’s actual work. Boring or misguided sessions could create a negative impression about training in general. Your courses need to be as role-specific as possible, and appropriate for your audience’s culture and learning preferences.
Make your training incremental: As you probably discovered back in high school, cramming for tests isn’t a good way to retain knowledge. Breaking long or complicated topics up into multiple shorter sessions enables gradual study, and deeper learning. As a bonus, your employees may appreciate your consideration in spreading training out instead of making it a big extra task on top of their regular responsibilities.
Outsourcing training is one solution for companies large and small who are looking for cost effective access to professional expertise. However you design your trainings, make sure that you engage your employees at every stage.
