How To Motivate Your Staff For Learning And Development

Well-trained employees know how to perform their duties effectively, which means they can carry out their responsibilities and deliver excellent results. With staff development, human resources (HR) managers can give their workers the valuable skills they need to enhance their daily tasks.  

While employee training is vital for productivity, most employees don’t like attending these programs. Instead of actively participating in the activities, they don’t practice active listening and fail to gain new knowledge. As a result, the company’s initiatives to boost performance won’t be successful, and its operating procedures will be slower. 

In this post, we will look at five concrete strategies that you can use to inspire your workers to engage in learning and development actively.

Ask What They Want 

Asking what employees want will help the HR team to understand their interaction levels and send them a message that indicates how much they’re valued. When workers feel heard and appreciated, they will likely commit to their tasks and boost their productivity. In addition, they will feel like their voices impact the organization, thus urging them to use them more often. 

Since asking employees what they want can increase their drive, you must use this strategy to motivate them so you can add opportunities to develop their skills. These questions may include their recent milestones, which rewards matter the most to them, and how they prefer using their strengths in their current and future jobs. After collecting this information from your employees, you must apply these insights to create development opportunities that best resonate with their abilities and roles. 

Offer Incentives

An employee incentive is a reward developed in the workplace to stimulate higher levels of productivity and involvement. Most companies include rewards, such as referral programs, health and wellness, awards and recognition, bonuses, promotion, and tuition reimbursement. Businesses can use this technique to help retain their best employees and inspire the staff to reach their career goals.   

Since offering incentives directly impacts employees’ career development, you should use this strategy to inspire them during training. Before the activity, you need to present its value by outlining the connection between completing this training and the practical ways to use it in their actual jobs. After that, you may consider offering travel incentives for those who successfully maintain a high-performance score during the learning program by sending them to a conference event in a different city or country. 

Introduce Bite-Sized Micro-Learning Sessions

In the educational sector, micro-learning is a strategy that deals with shorter learning activities by breaking complicated topics into smaller segments. By offering short lessons in the training, organizations can ensure that they can match the trainees’ short-term attention and long-term skill retention. In addition, this technique is less time-consuming, encouraging the participants to complete the course more efficiently. 

Since micro-learning can help employees retain smaller pieces of knowledge within a short period, they are likely to be more engaged in the training sessions. You must create bite-sized micro-learning courses using the insights you gather after asking your staff what they want to learn. It would be best if you kept each content simple and brief while using a relatable tone to encourage active engagement when developing topics. 

Develop Mobile Versions

Most employees prefer using mobile devices to access learning materials with recent technological innovations. They can download mobile educational apps that provide access to study documents like this advanced health assessment that complements their learning and skills at their convenience. Instead of attending long and tedious training courses, they are more engaged when they can review the course topics independently. Additionally, they like having minimal assignments related to development rather than dealing with time-consuming physical activities.

Since most workers now have mobile phones, you should develop mobile-responsive versions of your learning program design to motivate them during training. When building a mobile-friendly course, you must look for the most credible mobile learning platforms to help your employees control their educational process. After that, you must divide the content into three-minute modules and provide an easy-to-understand guide so they can quickly follow the course. 

Match Training With Advancement Opportunities

Employee advancement opportunities can help workers reach new career milestones and increase their pay grades. When they have the right skills and expertise, they will be ready to qualify for executive-level positions like senior management consultant or director of operations. If companies offer these opportunities as an incentive for completing a training course, they will likely become more engaged and committed to learning new skills. 

Since aligning training with advancement opportunities can motivate employees to be more participative in their career development, you have to follow this strategy. First, you have to find gaps in the current performance of your staff so you can understand where to direct your training objectives. Then, you have to communicate this initiative through corporate training videos, so they’ll know the purpose of this session and the long-term advantage of their new knowledge and abilities. 

Key Takeaway

As an HR manager, you must find ways to help your employees become more participative in their career growth. Therefore, you must consider following these five effective strategies to motivate your staff for learning and development. Once you do so, you will encourage them to reach new milestones by helping them commit to learning and development, which will give them the expertise in performing their tasks.