For some companies, employee training is something workers dread. This is unfortunate since employee training that is both engaging and effective can yield benefits like increased job satisfaction and motivation, more efficient work processes, and higher levels of innovation and team collaboration. If companies want to see these results, they have to ensure their remote employees, who are much more isolated than on-location employees, don’t encounter boring training. But how will company leaders know if their employees are disengaged from training?
“Four signs that your employees are bored by your training program include a decrease in requests for training, workplace innovation, and employee morale as well as a decline in customer satisfaction,” said a contributor to Study.com.1 “If these signs sound familiar, then it's time for you to revamp your employee training program.”
Organizational leaders can also use tools such as LMS reporting and employee surveys to determine whether or not remote learners are engaging with training.
Here are a few simple ways to improve the quality of remote employee training and boost learner engagement:
1. Space out compliance training
Compliance training is notorious for being bland, yet it’s unavoidable. Many employees must take the same compliance courses year after year to get recertified in certain areas. What’s more, it can be tough to improve the fun factor of compliance courses, such as a COVID-19-related course on health and safety, since much of the course content is standardized to meet regulatory requirements.
One change company leaders can make to ensure compliance training isn’t perceived as boring is to space it out so that learners aren’t burdened with too much of it at one time. For example, consider cutting each compliance course in half, creating a Part 1 and Part 2 to the original course, and sandwiching them between eLearning courses that employees have historically found more interesting. If that’s not possible and the course must be kept whole, make sure it’s as succinct as possible.
Related Reading: Increase Employee Engagement with LMS Compliance Training
2. Challenge your L&D team to remove all unnecessary training content
eLearning courses sometimes contain unnecessary, overwhelming, or redundant content. Such content doesn’t just encompass text - it can also include graphics. By trimming down courses that look cluttered and are packed full of information, you can help to ensure workers don’t get bored with training.
“Remove unnecessary content from employee training courses” is a vague directive for your L&D team. Try making your request more specific by challenging training designers to remove a percentage of content from every online course. If courses are very long, you might choose to ask that 25 percent of the content be removed. If they are shorter, 10 percent may be a better choice. Let L&D staff know this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but a lighthearted challenge that will help make training more enjoyable for learners.
3. Cross-train employees
Offer training that gives employees the opportunity to see how other related departments work, and help them to see the bigger picture. Cross-training your teams enables employees to gain new skills, build empathy for their peers, connect with employees across more departments than their own, and engage more deeply with training and ultimately, their jobs.
4. Offer practical training courses
You might find that practical courses that teach highly transferable skills will be perceived by learners as more fun than typical courses. A few examples of these courses include public speaking, time management, resume-building, and working with various software programs. Courses like these tend to be more engaging because learners can immediately put the skills they learn to use.
To make practical courses even more fun, keep them relatively short, or divide them up into several very short segments. The courses can be spaced in employee learning paths in a way that gives learners a break from courses that are less popular with employees.
5. Add interactive elements to online courses
The most engaging training courses are interactive. They include quizzes, videos, social learning elements, and games. For remote workers, they also include forums where learners can communicate with one another about the course. A fast way to drastically improve an eLearning course is to simply make it as interactive as possible without being cluttered or too text-dense.
Are you interested in leveling up your company’s remote training by making training more interactive? A learning management system (LMS) like TOPYX can help you do all of this and more. Find out about our Quick Start Program today.
Sources:
[1] https://study.com/blog/4-signs-your-employees-are-bored-by-your-training-program-how-to-engage-them.html