You often hear a mandatory training session which interrupts your employees’ normal routine called a corporate crime. People don’t like being distracted from their work schedule unless you offer them something truly rewarding. Incorporating training to foster team growth with a long-term perspective is anything but easy. But, you can actually make corporate training into an activity people won’t want to miss. Let’s explore the how-to’s.
Why your employees must attend trainings
The tricky thing about professional training is although people don’t always want to attend them, they view training as vital to advancing their careers. 7 out of 10 employees state the capability for professional growth impacts their decision on whether to stay with a company or not. Here are the factors that make corporate training attendance a must for your staff:
- Engagement boost. During professional trainings, employees get the tools for improving their skill sets. These skills open the doors to company goals and missions. As a result, the business gains professionals who are super engaged in what the company strives to accomplish.
- Leaving the comfort zone. Cross-training, which is a popular format of engaging employees, helps people step into a new expertise zone. Build trainings that demonstrate new learning perspectives for your staff. This definitely makes people want more.
- Collaborative opportunities. Professional training is great team building. If you get people to learn together, you can get them to collaborate more efficiently on a daily basis.
The secret to the first corporate training success
Making a lasting first impression is challenging, particularly because it’s hard to predict the employees’ reactions to a newly baked corporate activity. This is why you have to invest increased time and effort into the planning stage to design your initial meeting for success:
Estimate training needs
Perfect corporate training is a win-win for your company and participating employees. Start your training needs analysis by analyzing the goals of the company and the activities that might help your team perform business goals more efficiently. The challenge you can encounter at this stage is how to marry the needs of your company with the actual interests of employees. Try asking. Use surveys or one-on-one meetings to tap into knowledge gaps, professional interests, and hobbies of your staff. This can set the right direction for your training.
Establish the metrics
Having training without metrics is like running a marathon without finding out your results at the end. You call the results the learning objectives or training KPIs. Developing a set of principles with which employees are able to evaluate what they have gained at the training session is crucial.
Design the right materials
Rushing directly into a training lacking the right tools at your fingertips is painful. When it comes to professional corporate training, it’s all about the content. Make sure your team gets the opportunity to consume content in diverse forms, utilize the capabilities of technology, and appeal to multiple senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc.). Here’s what your training can turn into if you fail to design the right materials:
Interact
If you haven’t done it at the previous stage, this is the right time to think about how you can make the meeting interactive. To motivate employees to participate in training, add some fun role-playing, flip charts, e-learning authoring schools, or an interactive video that resonates with the theme of the meeting. Check out the video created by Annual Safety for an internal training session:
Implement training
Giving people enough time to prepare for the meeting is the number 1 rule. By sending an email invitation with a catchy and informative subject line beforehand, you give employees enough time to work the training into their schedules. On the day of the meeting, send reminders, prepare all necessary materials, and review the plan to keep things under control when the time comes.
Motivate employees to attend the next training session
If you manage to make your first training session fabulous, it doesn’t always mean people will show up next time. To incentivize attendance, your initial training should incorporate some catchy activities – anything to literally drag your staff to the next meeting. Award events are excellent attention keepers. Here’s how you can incorporate them into a training session to convert employees long-term:
- Competition mode. There’s no better way to boost engagement at a training session than make it competitive. Inform your staff that they have to compete with each other during a session either individually or in small teams. A competition can be built around expertise level, creativity, or any other aspect a meeting touches upon. To stretch it, you can announce the results of a competition at the beginning of every new session.
- Awards ceremony. If you develop KPIs for every training participant, you can easily evaluate the performance of employees based on the results of every meeting. Tell your team that after every 10 training sessions, there is an awards ceremony where the most active and creative participants are rewarded for their contributions.
- Email awards. With the help of automated tools like GEVME Email Marketing, you can send messages with personalized feedback to every participant. To make it fun, you can nominate employees in different categories like, “The best joke award” or “First responder.”
Conclusion
Successful corporate training sessions motivate your staff grow inside the company and keep turnover rates low. However, to make it work, you should craft a plan motivating employees to participate in training long-term. Award activities help you keep people tuned in to every new session.
