For any business, training their employees is a critical investment which can pay off over time with more skilled employees. But for the employees, training is often meaningless blather where they are forced to sit and listen to someone speak about useless topics without actually learning anything.

Training programs often fail to engage employees because no one likes to be lectured to. A manager who wants to get the most out of training needs to think about what his workers want, come up with different and more interactive training methods, and promote communication.

Above all else, managers need to be creative, realize that different employees react best to different training methods, and use that knowledge to make the best and most personalized programs possible. Hopefully, the result will be employees who come to training to truly learn something and not to just skip out of work for an afternoon.

Training is for your Employees, Not for You

The biggest reason why employees tune out training is that they do not understand why they are there. Diversity training in particular suffers from this problem. By highlighting differences between races or ages, all too often it promotes a counter reaction of people claiming “What’s the big deal? It’s the way things are.” But in general, many businesses force employees into training programs without fully explaining what the employees stand to get out of it. And if your employee has no incentive to learn, he is not going to learn.

Consequently, the first thing a training program should discuss is not the program itself, but how the program will help the people attending. Draw their interest by showing how they can benefit from a more diverse workforce or by using new technology. By putting their interests first, you can create an engaged workforce who will be eager to get something out of training that will help them.

Interaction and Games

If you’re a company like One Sure Insurance, even if you have convinced your employees that training is in their interests, they will have a hard time staying interested if they are just watching yet another guy give another PowerPoint lecture. Training is not teaching. It is not just about learning how to do something, but also about applying that knowledge to your work.

This means that a good training program should have a high degree of interaction. Games in particular are a highly useful ways to promote employee engagement. Instead of a lecture where an instructor tells us what we are doing wrong, games create a system where people are rewarded for learning and doing things correctly. Positive reinforcement is always more useful than negative reinforcement.

Of course, creating a relevant and competitive game requires creativity and thought. But there are plenty of examples, particularly online, which shows how companies can design games to teach practically any concept. As noted above, the most important thing is to be creative and design a game which rewards players for doing things correctly instead of punishing them for mistakes.

The Value of Video Learning

Video marketing has grown dramatically over the past few years because it attracts more interest from customers compared to text or images. This also applies to training. By showing a video of how to respond to a situation instead of a list of bullets, you can keep employees interested as they have a visual example of their training efforts. Videos crams more information into a short span, which is great for a society whose attention spans continue to grow ever smaller.

Video also has another advantage in that it is generally more accessible and training companies may be willing to share their videos online. If you are really willing to trust your employees, you can even have them train on their own time by watching videos. While there are certainly risks to that approach, showing them that trust will improve their morale and increase their willingness to go through training and remember what is taught.

Promote Communication

You may use a training program which you may think is incredible. But without feedback from your employees, it is virtually impossible to tell if they enjoy it, are learning something from it, and what adjustments needs to be made.

Trainers often encourage employees to fill out forms or surveys so that they know how to improve. Your business should do the same thing and encourage employees to speak out if they did not like a training program and listen to their complaints. Promoting an open communication culture is always valuable and especially so to figure out a training program’s strengths and weaknesses.  

In addition to employee feedback, management should attend these training courses alongside their employees to judge a program’s effectiveness with their own eyes. This also shows attending employees that management values the training enough to attend, which indicates that they should value it too.