This is a major challenge for learning managers and a lack of engagement can lead to sleepless nights. Think about it — you’re a learning manager and you’ve convinced your company to invest in a learning management system, it’ll be pretty embarrassing if nobody turns up!
Not to worry. The good news is that most employees want to progress in their careers, and they know the part that training plays in those aspirations.
If you’re a learning manager, your job is to nurture that desire without boring your learners to ambivalence – and we’re going to tell you how!
Employee Training Motivation in 8 Simple Steps
1. Incorporate Training As Part of Your Culture
Get your key decision-makers involved, set a positive example and make training ‘the way we do things here’. In this way, you’re encouraging and enabling employees to learn from each other as well as the formal training content.
2. Provide Regular Feedback
There’s nothing motivating about busy-work and if they get the slightest whiff that their efforts are pointless, they’ll switch off immediately. Make sure that you’re assessing your learners regularly and give them a sense of where they are in their training journey.
3. Keep It Interesting
Spice it up a little; add videos, record a podcast or build a learning game (it’s not as hard as you might think). By giving your employees a variety of opportunities to interact with the content, you can keep your training programme interesting and fresh.
4. Contextualise Your Employees’ Training
Find the Epic Meaning at the heart of your business and show your employees how vital their efforts are to achieving organisational goals. Make sure you highlight the part that training plays in the grander scheme and they’ll soon begin to see the value.
5. Make The Training Relevant
Segment your training programme according to the department to keep the content relevant to each individual’s actual job. By providing the training they need, it won’t seem like such an impediment to their development.
6. Identify Employee Strengths
With a more personalised, adaptive training programme, your employees can organically work on their strengths and develop in a way that maximises them. By focusing on the areas that interest them the most, they’ll be much more inclined to keep logging in and engaging with their training.
7. Emphasise The Long-term Career Prospects
The question, ‘what’s in it for me?’ will always be at the back (or the front) of their minds. So, if you want to motivate them, you need to make sure you can address it. One way to highlight the benefit of the training programme is to align it with performance management.
If you can be more transparent about how each training activity impacts on their career prospects, it will lend credibility and give them yet another reason to log on to the LMS.
8. Recognise Their Expertise
Use your learning platform to highlight the experts in your business. This is one of the first steps to encouraging a knowledge-sharing culture. Once you have that, other employees will see who the experts are and they’ll know who to contact if they’re stuck.
As a bonus, they’ll also see that yours is the kind of organization that rewards people and recognizes the hard work they put into their training. What could be more motivational than that?!
Final Words:
There you have it. The secrets to generating effortless employee training motivation. It won’t come easily, but if you put in the work, you can create a meaningful high performance learning culture within your organisation. And if you can achieve that, there are no limits to the impact that your training will have!
Looking for ways to make your training programme more appealing?