You are a human resources professional who takes skilling up your workforce seriously. You recognise that training is a significant time and money investment, and that training can profoundly – or not so profoundly – elevate productivity. You are shopping around for the right employee training courses but have concerns:
Will staff sign-up?
If they do, will it result in real-world improvements?
These are questions regularly raised by training and development professionals worth their salt and for good reason. All too often training is not well attended, or lessons are not appropriately applied to the job.
These four tips are designed to motivate your staff to sign-up for and buy into training. With a sound strategy using these principles, your team will not only learn new aptitudes, but incorporate them into their workflow for noticeable gains.
1. Ask Them What They Need
If you have not already done so, survey your workforce to learn what training they need to perform their jobs better. Their answers may guide you in an unexpected training direction, or provide greater context to an employee training program you already had in mind.
Why It Helps: Employees are more likely to be enthusiastic about training if they know it will directly improve their abilities. Asking employees what they want and following up as such also demonstrates that leadership is listening to staff.
2. Personalise Employee Training
Nobody wants to listen to a canned business skills training session. A one-size-fits-all approach is, to put it bluntly, boring. Listening to a speaker reading from a script, especially via video, is not conducive to optimal learning. Who wants to cover skills they already have? Who wants to learn skills that they won’t use? A personalised training program obviates these problems since it is tailored to teach the group exactly what they need to learn.
Why It Helps: A customised business skills training program will help to get personnel to sign-up and use the information for positive behavioural change in the workplace. A personalised training that is conducted live, in person is a particularly powerful method for boosting employee engagement in the learning process.
3. Integrate Employee Training into Company Culture
Integrating training into company culture means implementing programs such as continuous improvement protocols, skills gap bridging or professional development series. Regardless of which form it takes, at the heart of training-culture synthesis is the adoption of a growth mindset.
Essentially a growth mindset encourages ongoing learning and improvement. A pro-training company culture will value a growth mindset and encourage employees to take ownership of their own learning.
Why It Helps: Fostering a growth mindset makes employees feel empowered; they are encouraged to learn and feel the company has their back in that process. They will be more likely to seek out training that gives them the tools to attain higher levels of achievement.
4. Tie It to Advancement Potential
Workers who see a path for advancement within a company are more likely to be motivated on the job and remain with their employer. These high-performing, loyal employees are exactly the type that generates business profitability and future growth.
Give them what they want. Create a training program that introduces and enhances competencies they will need for promotion.
Why It Helps: Connecting business skills training with upward mobility is a win-win for a company. It solves the problem of employee training buy-in and goes far in alleviating skills gaps, employee turnover and low morale.
Deliver on Training and Business Outcomes
Training in the workplace is not just about skilling up employees. It’s about improving employee satisfaction and team collaboration. It’s about preparing the workforce for new technologies and shifting markets. It’s about improving productivity and hitting projections.
In short, everything important rides on employee training. As a great human resources professional, you know this.
