How to develop a powerful employee training strategy

Published by Carole Bower on March 11, 2022March 11, 2022

How do I develop a powerful training strategy for employees?

When deciding on an HR and management strategy, one of the questions that often comes up for companies is: How do I develop a powerful training strategy for employees? The importance of employee training lies in its correlation with employee performance and retention. Lack of training can significantly affect employee productivity.

Training opportunities can help with recruitment and employee retention when they align with employee goals. An employee will be more productive and less likely to resign if they feel they’re achieving their career goals. Corporate training can help employees progress in their careers.

Corporate training should go hand-in-hand with an employee’s desire for professional growth. If an employee feels unsatisfied with their training, they are 12 times more likely to resign than an employee who feels they’re achieving their career goals.

The financial loss for a company due to low-quality training and poor performance is compounded by the additional cost of having to replace an employee.

So, it’s clear that helping employees achieve their career goals not only ensures they are happy at work, but also that they improve their performance. For employers, the value is obvious: Employee satisfaction translates into employee retention.

Gather feedback

As an employer, when asking yourself “how do I develop a powerful training strategy for employees?” you should begin by establishing your goals. In this case, the training targets that you want your employees to achieve. This involves deciding what KPIs you’ll be using to measure the employee’s progress in achieving their target, or you could look at setting OKRs (objectives and key results) with your team.

The point is that training should align with your corporate goals and fill the gaps in your employees’ skill sets. That’s why it’s a good idea to start by identifying the skills that employees are lacking. For example, skills that would benefit the employees themselves as well as the company overall.

Finally, you need to take the time to define what success looks like. This could be in attaining OKRs or hitting KPIs, or it could just be in proving the addition of new skill sets to your team.

Benchmark the current performance to set new standards

After you’ve taken the time to establish goals and define success, the next step is to understand where you are now. This means benchmarking your current performance so that after training you can see what’s worked and what hasn’t.

You should use the indicators listed above as a yardstick to compare an employee’s current performance with the new one they’re aiming for.

Benchmarking is a pivotal element of developing a powerful training strategy for employees. Benchmarking allows an employer to measure employee performance properly.

Planning the training strategy

When planning the training strategy, the employer needs to know who the decision-makers and stakeholders are. Importantly, these stakeholders can be both internal (like HR) and external (like clients). You also need to identify any possible logistical challenges. For example, whether employee training will be carried out remotely or on-site, or if there are any accessibility needs.

In doing so, employers have to ask themselves what the best tools are for a powerful training strategy. The best training isn’t just about toolkits and documents, it’s more about understanding how we learn and retain information.

Behavioural science can help us understand how we learn; it can help decide what kind of learning will be the most appropriate for employee training and how best to deliver that learning.

Whilst behavioural science should underpin the approach, the next question to consider is: What tools should you use? The best training is bespoke. Yes, it’s possible to use some ‘off-the-shelf’ modules, but in most cases, you need a tool customised to your specific situation.

The most immersive solutions on the market use what’s called digital experiences, scenario-based training solutions that are engaging and immersive. These cutting-edge training solutions not only drive engagement due to their immersive digital nature, but they also help employees understand why the rules are what they are. Without going into too much detail, this second point is about digital experiences which allow users to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ to better understand where they are coming from or how they might feel in a given situation. This empathy allows the training to go deeper and make a lasting impression on the user.

Training outcome evaluation

Finally, you need to evaluate the training results to measure performance. This way, an employer can find out exactly what the strong and weak points of their training strategy are, along with what information was retained and what wasn’t.

Employees can also provide their own feedback on how engaging they found the training methods, so you need some sort of testing to capture data.

This allows you to implement the necessary changes to the training strategy and improve training quality.

At BAD, we can help you develop the most powerful employee training strategy for your company. By incorporating digital experiences inspired by our background in behavioural science, we create bespoke training strategies.

Get in touch today to find out exactly how we can help you improve your employee training strategy.