In the last few years, ongoing employee training programs have shifted from nice-to-have to a must-have for large enterprises. Employee engagement and corporate culture have become increasingly important in the business world. Exactly 61% of top jobseekers value a positive business environment with opportunities for career growth more than a high salary.
At the same time, the globalization of business means that your company is competing in a larger market than ever before. Raising the expectation and putting the pressure to keep productivity high and costs low is are instrumental. There’s no time to waste on poor employee training programs, which hemorrhage money while taking employees away from their vital tasks.
The good news is that when you adopt the right digital tools and new approaches this means that your employee training program can satisfy a number of areas. It can be highly effective at helping new employees to onboard to your company quickly, while also providing ongoing professional development to existing workers without severely interrupting their work. Far from disrupting your business, the right employee training program does much more than keeping people’s skills up to date. When it is done well the ongoing training can improve your reputation while also helping your enterprise achieve business goals.
Here are four ways that your employee training program can improve your overall business reputation.
1. Personalized programs create a supportive company culture
A recent workplace survey found that 77% of employees consider a company’s culture before they apply for a job. Fortunately, you can create an employee training program that gives an impression of positive company culture from the outset.
Personalized employee training programs allow each user to learn at their own pace, without feeling any pressure to take more time over their learning or shame that they are taking too long. Prompts, reminders, and shortcuts to help sections are embedded within business tools, so each employee can ask for help privately and without attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Deploying digitized programs instead of matching employees with human mentors also takes away any embarrassment on behalf of the mentee about asking more questions, or not understanding something the first time around. This creates a supportive corporate culture that helps your workers feel that they are in a safe work environment and enabling each employee to fulfill their potential in the workplace.
2. Contextual learning boosts productivity
Boosting productivity is a key KPI for every enterprise around the world, so it can be reassuring to know that the right employee training program can help. Digital tools offer contextual learning, enabling active education in the course of carrying out real work tasks. It turns your employees from passive recipients of instruction into active participants in the process, increasing the amount that they remember, and making them more productive.
If you’re not sure about this, just remember learning how to throw and catch a ball when you were a kid. You probably picked up how to follow the path of the ball and reach out to catch it automatically pretty quickly. Now imagine that instead of someone taking you out back to toss a ball around you had been sat down in a chair and forced to listen to an explanation of the principles of physics with a teacher telling you how to move your hand and keep your eye on the ball.
It’s unlikely that you’d have learned faster using the second method. That’s because the first approach made you into an active participant in your learning, and we all learn better that way. You want to do the same when training new employees. When your employees are active learners, they’ll feel confident about their responsibilities and understand how to use all your business tools efficiently much faster than if they have to sit through a series of employee development talks.
3. Gamification raises employee buy-in to continual professional development
You want your employees to feel committed to their own ongoing professional development. In addition, continue to learn new skills and improve their efficiency at work. Sometimes, this can feel like an uphill battle as sophisticated development programs often go unused, and your employees are happy to muddle along the way they are.
Enter the new style of employee development programs. These use gamification, cutting-edge visuals, and video-game style challenges to increase employee buy-in to continue to pursue professional education.
Leaderboards, point-scoring, systems of prizes, and rewards create an atmosphere of healthy competition that ensures that your employees are always at the top of their skills.
4. Digitized learning programs raises the company’s professional reputation
Handing over a huge binder full of educational material is simply embarrassing in today’s digital world.
You want to show that your business is innovative and forward-facing. In other words, riding the cutting edge of technology, so why would you undermine that by fielding an employee training program that comes off as antiquated? Given the extent to which today’s job market favors the employee, you can’t afford that kind of black mark on your reputation as an employer.
It makes sense to use all the media at your disposal. offering audio and video resources alongside traditional text versions, and providing smart programs that respond to each employee’s learning style and pace.
Digital training programs help your enterprise in more ways than you realize
Deploying smart, customized employee training and development programs raise your business profile in more ways than you’d expect. Creating a supportive and positive corporate culture, improving your reputation as innovative and forward-thinking, increasing employee buy-in to ongoing professional education, and boosting productivity in the workplace all go a long way to making your enterprise an