E-learning can be tough, especially if you’re used to teaching in person. Here’s how to develop a winning e-learning strategy and help employees improve skills and further their knowledge.
Supporting your employees with upskilling is a win-win situation.
Introducing eLearning programs allows your employees to grow their skills and knowledge, without eating into their own time or money. 40% of employees feel that their current roles are evolving rapidly and that they need to learn new skills and new ways of working with people to support changing business priorities.
In return, you get staff armed with the latest information to improve the work they do, a stronger skill set, and a happier workforce. In fact, 94% of employees say they would stay longer at a company that invested in their learning and development.
Providing these opportunities is a way to empower your workers to keep learning and gaining new skills, but how can you ensure that they stay engaged and motivated?
Here are 5 tricks to keep your workers productive and engaged during eLearning:
1) Give Them Ownership
Giving your staff more control over their eLearning process is a great way to encourage more engagement. It also gives your employees more satisfaction in completing their goals. Whether your eLearning courses are mandatory, or more flexible, there are ways you can hand over the feeling of control to your employees to improve engagement.
Start by allowing your employees to decide the pace and setting for their learning. This feeling of autonomy will make it easier for them to fit professional development into their workload, and find their productivity sweet spot. Micromanaging the learning process may lead to a feeling of restriction and can have a negative effect on your workers’ morale and their drive to learn.
Giving employees ownership also allows them to carve their own path. By giving your staff more opportunities to make decisions around how and when they would like to learn, the more satisfied they will feel when they’ve completed the course in the way they planned.
However, this doesn’t mean leaving your workforce in the dark. A LinkedIn report revealed that 54% of employees would spend more time learning if they had specific course recommendations to help them reach their career goals. This tells us that some direction is appreciated.
2) Ask for Their Ideas
When implementing new eLearning projects, asking your employees for their feedback and opinions can make the experience more meaningful. A Salesforce report revealed that employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
This means that if your employees feel they have helped influence the direction you move in, this can translate into more engagement and a feeling of gratification when they see this come to life.
Bringing in elements to your eLearning that come from your employees’ suggestions will result in more engagement and motivation. If they’ve requested something it’s because they feel it’s missing, so if they see their ideas come to life, they’ll be more excited to jump right in..
3) Set Goals
There’s a satisfaction that comes from achieving goals, even more so when you’ve achieved it together with your team.. For this reason, setting both individual and team goals can be very effective.
Having something to work towards is also great for productivity. It allows your workers to set expectations for themselves around what they should be achieving and keep working at a good pace.
The most important thing is sharing these goals upfront, and ensuring that everybody understands why they are in place, and how they fit into the broader goals of your company.
Gartner revealed that their findings show that an increasing number of employees feel disconnected from their organization’s goals. Between 2012 and 2019, there was a 5% drop in employees that reported to understand the broader goals of their organization and how their work fits into wider company success.
Your goals should outline your expectations for your workers’ approach to online learning. Once your goals are well defined, you need to find ways to measure them.
4) Measure Success
Understanding how well you are doing with your online learning courses is important and helps employees stay motivated. Online quizzes are a great way to test knowledge and make learning more engaging.
You could introduce a quiz at the end of each course, or as part of the program that they work through to stay on top of the material.
In addition to helping your staff measure their success, it’s important to measure the success of the eLearning program too.
In a LinkedIn Workplace Learning report, Learning and Development professionals revealed that they measure the impact of online learning most with qualitative feedback from employees, followed by the number of online courses completed.
Whether you measure progress, quantity, attainment (or all 3), the results should also help you understand how your employees are getting on with the material. This can highlight if you need to step in to provide additional support or make necessary changes to the way you are working. This can help improve overall employee satisfaction and productivity in a more holistic way.
5. Celebrate Their Success
Employee recognition goes a long way. In fact, 37% of workers said it was the most important thing a manager or company could do to help them be successful.
Celebrating your employees’ success can be really meaningful. It can also help those who are noticed continue to feel motivated while encouraging others to step up and match the efforts to their colleagues.
When you implement your eLearning program, it’s a good idea to create a process around how you plan to celebrate success among your workers. However you celebrate success, it’s important to be consistent.
This might mean a simple email to everyone in the company to highlight an employee that meets a certain goal. It could also be verbal recognition in meetings, or it could be a reward or gift at the end of the process for your superstars.
Maintaining a feeling of satisfaction and boosting productivity isn’t easy…
But, as long as you kick off the program with clear goals, consistency, and plans for how you measure and reward your employees’ engagement, you’ll find that introducing an eLearning program creates a more meaningful experience for your workers.
About the Author: Alex Birch is the SEO Manager at Typeform. Lover of all things marketing and search. Originally from Manchester, UK but now enjoying life in sunny Barcelona.
