The importance of employee training
Employee training is a crucial part of an employee’s journey. It represents an excellent opportunity for employees to grow their knowledge and improve their job skills. Despite the cost of training for employees, the return on investment is guaranteed if the employee training takes place consistently.
Top-performing companies recognize the importance of their human capital and the need to constantly provide their people with the environment to enhance their skills and perform at their best. Unfortunately, decision-makers often underestimate the importance of employee training and are too optimistic about the level of training they are providing.
Employee training is a continuous and never-ending process, which shouldn’t solely be tied to the onboarding process.
This article explains the benefits of employee training and provides a list of reasons why eLearning is the best solution for frontline employees.
Benefits of employee training and development
The top benefit for driving employee development is to create a more efficient, competitive, and engaged workforce. Nevertheless, the benefits of employee training and development are boundless and not limited to employees. Organizations can gain many advantages from effective employee training programs. A few are listed below:
- Higher productivity. Companies with highly engaged and dedicated employees see a 41% lower absenteeism rate and 17% higher productivity. Proper training is the only way to make your employees ready to work according to all quality and operational standards. As a consequence, it positively affects the profitability of your business.
- Improved safety in the workspace. Ensuring that all employees are adequately trained helps avoid hazards and create and maintains a healthy and safe work environment.
- Reduced costs & use of resources. Providing training to all frontline staff translates to minimizing the need for supervision and other resources. In addition, all employees are well aware of their duties and responsibilities, and managers can focus on other initiatives.
- Higher employee engagement and motivation. Employee training helps employees with their professional development and career growth. Moreover, according to IBM research, 42% of new employees are more likely to stay when provided with the proper training, translating into less turnover intention.
- Enhance customer satisfaction. Having a trained workforce opens the doors to high customer satisfaction. Frontline employees who know every detail about your products or services are able to help your customers succeed.
- Increase your competitive edge. With an increasing number of online competition, customer-facing sales and service roles are becoming more essential for creating customer experiences and establishing brand differentiation. Based on the results of a recent survey, 61% of customers globally have stopped their relationship with a brand due to poor customer service. Training frontline employees to develop their soft skills will improve their customer service with a human touch.
- Higher ROI. According to the Association for Talent Development, Organizations that invest in employee development see a higher income per employee of 218%.
Why eLearning is a popular solution for frontline employees
eLearning is an efficient training method offering students educational courses in an online setting. Compared to traditional training methods, the prime advantage of eLearning is that it is accessible to the learner at any time and place. Therefore employees can be trained remotely and across different locations. Other notable advantages of eLearning are a drastic reduction in training costs, time, and resources.
Nonetheless, promoting learning and innovation through digital transformation requires agility and creative collaboration across the organization. Follow our tips below to ensure your eLearning program is getting all the attention it needs.
Your eLearning program checklist
1. Train the entire team
If you’ve ever witnessed asking for food allergies in a restaurant and saw the waiter running to the kitchen panicking, you know what we’re talking about. Training should not be limited to just a part of your workforce. And in fact, staff development helps reduce knowledge leakage with customers, improves relationships among colleagues, and builds trust across departments.
2. Targeted training
To create a vibrant digital learning environment for your employees, you should provide them with a tailored training approach, for the right skills, at the right time, and the right job function. Targeted training allows employees to acknowledge their work functions better and take ownership of it. Tip: Start by setting up organization and community groups on your platform, and then organize your training programs in learning blocks to target them based on roles and responsibilities. E.g., Cash-flow training to Cashiers and Store Managers.
3. Keep your training up-to-date
Training is a continuous and never-ending process that should not be limited to onboarding or compliance training. The market is not static, and neither your employees’ skills should be. Therefore, maintaining active and constant training allows employees to keep pace with your organization’s development and innovations. Take advantage of the latest technologies to keep your training program updated. With the right tools, creating eLearning and Microlearning material can be super easy and fun.
4. Mobile eLearning
New generations of frontline employees want to have just-in-time training available on their mobile devices. This data is worth even more considering frontline workers do not sit behind desks on their workdays and are not provided with business laptops. What they do have, however, is a mobile phone, with all the information right at their fingertips. So use it to your advantage!
5. Use multiple content formats
Different people learn and absorb information differently. Therefore, to convey information to employees so that they will find it engaging and exciting, remember to include a mix of readings, videos, presentations, quizzes, audio, and surveys in your training. Tip: Let the camera roll! Video content is the most efficient format for product launches, technical explanations, and boosting customer support skills. Have you ever heard about whiteboard animation? It’s worth a try!
6. Involve your employees
To build a strong learning culture, you’ll need to maintain an interactive and collaborative approach. Opt for solutions that allow you to add and modify user permissions so that more people can create quizzes and encourage your employees to share their knowledge and ideas with the community.
7. Measure effectiveness
Traditional training methods are often hard to measure. eLearning, however, allows you to quickly evaluate training effectiveness and adapt the learnings for maximum impact.
8. Don’t exclude face-to-face learning
Be aware that eLearning does not substitute on-the-job training but enriches it and facilitates it. Finding the right balance between the two allows employees to gain more confidence and skills at their own pace. False myth: It is not true that you can’t teach soft skills through eLearning. Employers should encourage employees to complete customer service training. Try introducing realistic scenarios specific to your organization to shift perspective and change attitudes.
9. Choose the right eLearning platform
Indeed, the most suitable approach to choosing the right e-learning app is always to bear in mind both your company’s goals and requirements and your employees’ needs. For instance, if your workforce is primarily composed of frontline employees, you might better opt for scalable mobile solutions.
10. Integrate into the digital employee experience
Integrate the eLearning into a digital Employee Experience Platform so your frontline employees will only have one digital environment to connect with the workplace. Next to eLearning, they’ll be able to make use of the other solutions included in an Employee Experience Platform, like onboarding, internal communication, and employee surveys.
Looking for a solution that allows you to satisfy all of the above?
Oneteam is the all-in-one platform to help organizations make their deskless workforce successful and engaged. Oneteam’s solution includes modules for internal communication, onboarding, eLearning, forms, checklists, and surveys. It’s also possible to integrate with your current HR or WFM systems.
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