How to Engage Employees with Online Training Courses

The rapid changes of the business world present a unique opportunity for employee engagement. Humans are curious by nature and enjoy learning new things – when they have the ability to engage autonomously and see the benefits of their efforts.

How Can Businesses Keep Employees Engaged?

Most of all, employees wish to be able to succeed and grow where they work so they can operate as a team while fulfilling their needs. If they do not see a benefit to their efforts, most employees will quickly turn to shortcuts and lower their efforts. Creating intelligent and well-organized online training courses that take employee psychology into account will help employees succeed. And it will help the businesses they work for both short- and long-term. There are several key factors to consider when looking to get and keep employee engagement with provided online learning.

Even the best, most self-motivated employees benefit from having a contained online learning space provided for them by the company they work for. With a learning management system (LMS) in place, it’s clear what and how company managers want employees to spend their time on. Learning management systems are a one-stop online location for businesses to organize and add a variety of useful online learning courses for employees to explore and learn through.

This enables the business to track, evaluate, and reward employees for expanding their knowledge in ways that most benefit the overall company. The LMS is created and organized by the business to provide a funnel of information to learn from, in one place, with a single login.

Once the LMS is set up, employers should spend time running through the structures to test for ease of use and navigation. A disorganized or illogical structure will eliminate the usefulness of all the learning held inside.

Most employees do best when offered a choice in what information they pursue. A sense of autonomy is extremely important to employee satisfaction. In addition, having too many choices has been shown to reduce satisfaction and performance. When choosing a selection of online courses and training to go into a learning management system, it pays to strike a balance. Cultivate a number of courses that will directly help your teams, but ruthlessly cull ones that are chosen infrequently or have little satisfaction associated with them. It can be tempting to give employees every option in the world, but too much can be overwhelming and dilute the importance of each individual course selected for the LMS. To maximize autonomy, businesses can set goals for a certain number of courses or trainings taken but allow employees to choose the ones that interest them, in the order they prefer whenever possible, to fulfill the goal.

Through online training, employees can make their own decisions about the pace and selection of what they want to learn. By giving the employees freedom in their choices, and also limiting what they have to choose from, they will automatically experience greater satisfaction in their job.

As often as possible, include training that can improve the quality of an employee’s life.

For specific jobs, this may require knowledge that is carefully niched into their work. Allowing them to become more proficient in details of their particular work gives them a competitive leg up in the workplace and in their field overall which allows them to feel competent through what they get via the LMS.

Offering courses that help them to organize and refine their life, stress, work balance, and efficiency helps them deal with distractions, life events, and maintenance of their mental health. There is often a temptation to only stick to work-oriented offerings that will help the business, but lifestyle-oriented offerings increase motivation and quality of life. Employees that feel they are cared for maintain higher company loyalty, reducing costs for the company associated with employee turnover and training.

The combination of work-specific learning to improve competency and lifestyle-improving coursework to improve health is a recipe for employee engagement.

If possible, add a human element to online learning. Provide spaces for employees to talk about what they are learning in their LMS with either their managers, other employees, or both. Open discussion helps many people retain information through active recall and reinterpretation. Employees that work together may build on each other’s knowledge and advertise the usefulness of the courses in the LMS.

With discussion, employees need to feel their feedback is valuable. Allow employees to reward and determine which online courses and training are most and least valuable over time. The last thing an employer wants is for employees to talk about how useless the additional learning provided was. Group discussion allows for differing perspectives that can change the way employees feel about any individual training they take or inspire them to try ones they might not have engaged with otherwise.

Have everything in one place. A steady, efficient, and pleasant-to-use online learning platform location eliminates the need for annoying and time-consuming logging in and out of multiple websites, eliminates uncertainty about whether employees are pursuing information that will aid their performance, and helps employees stay organized, which frees up valuable cognitive space for thinking through what’s most important to your business.

If you want to find out how Coggno can help your business, request a demo from our team. We will help you choose the best platform for your business within your budget.