How people learn
Not every employee will learn the same. Most schools or universities will tell you that engagement varies depending on the student. You need to know how best to serve a variety of learning styles.
The key thing to note is that people learn best by doing, rather than watching or listening. Your training should encourage engagement by providing learners with tasks. Digital experiences are an excellent tool to improve training on new processes, ideas or materials. Well-designed digital experiences are designed with the audience in mind and therefore are suited to the way that the audience learns and what they need to learn. A digital learning course can be built to reflect an employees working environment, making it a relevant and useful safe space to practise applying knowledge and skills. For example, they could imitate a customer, and your employee needs to provide answers to their queries.
Set goals
Goals are what motivate us to perform well, both at work and in our personal lives. Your training should have clearly defined goals for your employees, to promote engagement.
There should be rewards for effective learning. This could include salary changes or even just a simple compliment among colleagues. You can start with micro-goals. We set small, satisfying goals – we chunk up the experience with little milestones or ‘missions’ that come with rewards.Why? When people don’t complete a task, it creates tension that they want to resolve. This tension helps us to remember information and motivates us to complete it (McKinney, 1935).Gamification is innovative digital learning technology. It turns learning content into an interactive game, where the employee can track progress and get rewarded for engaged learning. This provides clear goals and structures for each learner, motivating them to complete the learning process.
Regular training
According to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399982/#:~:text=The%20spacing%20effect%20refers%20to,study%20on%20the%20spacing%20effect)." target="_blank" rel="noopener">“The Spacing Effect”</a>, people perform better when they learn in bursts over time. People’s attention spans are naturally limited, and they gradually lose focus, especially when they are asked to retain lots of information at once. Training should be a gradual process made up of small, digestible elements. It should also be revisited training regularly. Coming back to a topic a few weeks later can increase the retention of the information and help complex information stick with the learner. For new hires, you should try and spread training across a few months but it depends on the material that needs to be covered and the users. You might want to set time aside every week for employee training. By providing regular training, you can increase employee engagement and productivity.
Follow up
Each employee will have a different experience with your training platforms. Ask your employees for feedback on your training offering. When you check in with your new hires, ask them about your onboarding training process. This is the most important part of your new employee’s journey within your company, so it needs to be effective. This feedback can help you adapt your onboarding process for the next round of hires. Your training processes will evolve, and that’s important. However, for it to improve you need to capture feedback from users. Good training improves productivity, engagement and employees’ happiness. Hard-working and happy workers benefit the business overall.
We help build custom digital learning experiences to create impactful training for your company. Get in touch with <a href="https://bestatdigital.com/about-us/">BAD today.</a>
