Employee training is one of the most crucial business functions of any organization. It’s a fact. If your employees feel like their skills aren’t growing, they start getting distracted, resulting in loss of productivity and causing a risk of them quitting the job.
But then, are they always excited about participating in your company’s training programs? Unfortunately, sometimes because of a hard to understand training program and sometimes for reasons, several of your employees may show disinterest in employee training. Read on for ways you can help change that.
Here are some practical tips as to how you can make sure that more of your employees attend your employee training programs.
1. First Things First, Fine Tune Your Training Process
One reason why employees may not want to attend your training sessions is a flawed training method.
This isn’t always about the technologies that you use. Flaws can crop up around anything from the management system to the course’s time table. As you want to train your employees adequately, it’s your duty to keep these flaws at bay. So, go through your training program and look for the loopholes that may be hindering your training process’ optimization.
2. Take Feedback Seriously
When an employee gives you feedback, they want it to be heard. They want to see the required changes in effect. They want to know whether you took it seriously or not. Plus, as this honest feedback would be coming straight from the employee(s) who attended your training session(s), it’ll be valuable. So, take it seriously and see how you can make the required changes to boost your training program’s efficiency.
This will also encourage other employees to participate in training actively. Yes, everyone likes it when their opinions are heard and acted upon.
Related: How to Make your Employee Stay With your Company for A Long Time
3. Showcase Benefits
Many times your employees may want to use your training program but fear wasting time. This fear rises when they doubt the usefulness of your training program. And it’s simple. If your training program isn’t adding value to their work life, why should they invest their time in it?
So, first of all (follow pointer 1 of this article) fine-tune your training program and process. And then, approach your target employees with the benefits that they’ll get if they sign up for your training program. An extension/improvisation for this pointer can be found in tip number six.
4. Make It Exciting Through Gamification
It happens with all of us. At some point in time, we all start losing interest in things when they get boring. And then an employee training program can often get significantly dull. Yes, your employees may not want to go through huge blocks of text to acquire something useful about your company, even if it may benefit them.
Your best bet? Spice it up a bit with gamification. Gamification of a training process includes the addition of certain elements that make training look, feel and come off as a fun-to-play game. So, this involves challenges, competing with fellow employees, reward points and a world of effortless knowledge transfer.
Well, there are myriads of game based learning solutions that you can incorporate with your company’s training program and see the results yourself.
5. Make Training a Part of Your Company Culture
Training may be important for your organization to educate its employees about several company cultures. But then employees may or may not be willing to participate. Best solution is to make training a part of your company culture.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to enforce everything and keep pushing your employees to attend sessions all the time. The idea is to get them on board for the program and introduce them to the course. After that, if the concept of this program suits them, they’ll stick around, or at least you’ll get to know what’s wrong with your program so that you can work on the weak areas. If you make training a part of your company culture, learner attendance won’t remain a challenge.
Related: Top 8 Ways to Make Your Employees Love Their Jobs
6. Make Use of Testimonials
Encouraging your employees to participate in your training program is nothing less than selling your products to your audience through marketing. That’s why testimonials can work wonders when it comes to encouraging your employees to take part in your training programs.
Collect positive testimonials regarding your company’s training program from your ex-employees and use them to lure the new hires into participating in your program.
7. Provide Access through a Variety of Devices
Some individuals use an iPad for reading. Some use a laptop. Some prefer using mobile phones. And others may use a desktop or something else. But the question is, is your course available across all these devices? Can your employees/learners access your company’s employee training program across different devices of their choice?
If not, this may be time for you to change that. It’s 2020, and nobody likes carrying their laptops to all the places that they visit. Solve this problem by creating a training program that’s available across a range of devices – from iPads to iPods, from laptops to desktops, from large-sized tablets to small screen smartphones. The plan is to let them learn; wherever they are, whenever they want, however, they like.
Final words
While you may make all the efforts to train your employees correctly, some of them may still not show interest in your training program. That’s when the need for upgrading rises. So, in this post, we talked about how you can make the upgrades happen. Hopefully, this will be helpful.
