The good news is that companies can fight against and prevent disengagement by improving the quality and efficiency of employee training. Mobile learning is a powerful tool to help L&D teams make a significant impact on employee engagement.2
Here are a few ways to use mobile learning to optimize corporate training and drive employee engagement:
Employee training sometimes fails, and it isn’t always due to dry content. Training failure can also be the result of ineffective learning strategies. After all, some learning strategies are more impactful than others.
To improve employee engagement, the Association for Talent Development recommends that companies create learning strategies that adapt well to mobile learning, such as gamification and story or scenario-based learning. “While most traditional eLearning strategies can be well adapted for mobile learning or mLearning, you can see added gains as you use (these) approaches,” wrote a contributor to ATD.3
Mobile devices lend themselves perfectly to short segments of training content, or microlearning, a form of learning that can increase employee engagement.4 There are several reasons why microlearning is engaging. One is because it is easier to absorb than more substantial chunks of training, such as a full-length eLearning course, and can hold an employee’s attention more effectively.
Another reason microlearning is engaging is that employees can apply it on the job. For example, a sales team member could take a couple of minutes to step away from the sales floor to refer to a short video on sales techniques or customer conflict resolution, and then return to their role with clarity and increased confidence. A natural result of this could be increased employee engagement.
Unclear training content can be disorienting and disengaging for workers. Delivering pre-training-session notes, audio recordings, and videos to employees’ mobile devices is a great way employers can support the comprehension and retention of corporate training. This strategy also aids workers in implementing the skills they glean from training, helping companies get the best ROI for their training investment.
For example, you could create an audio outline of an upcoming in-person training session, detailing what skills learners will hopefully gain and how these skills will help employee performance. Giving workers a heads up about what to expect from the training session will help them get more out of their learning experience. Also, allowing employees to access the recording on their mobile devices may encourage more of them to listen to the audio.
When implementing mobile learning, remember that it’s just as essential to incentivize it as other types of training. Rewarding employees who watch a video, take a quiz, listen to audio, or interact with a full online course on their mobile device can go a long way toward encouraging learners to continue participating in mobile learning, which can ultimately increase employee engagement.
While you can get as creative as you like with mobile learning incentives, a few ideas include giving high performers access to exclusive forums, publicly displaying certificates they earn through your learning management system, and including the learner of the month in your company’s newsletter.
Are you interested in getting more information about the benefits of mobile learning? Explore our related blog post, “4 Reasons Why Mobile Learning is the Future” or request a personalized demo of the Topyx online learning platform.
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