Designing Digitally
05/19/2020
Regardless of what our occupation and hobbies are in life, ultimately, we all seek happiness and fulfillment. If the work we do provides satisfaction and the opportunity for growth, employees will become loyal and actively involved in the process of improving themselves and the company they work at.
Today's growing millennial workforce is a self-taught generation. They crave continuous learning and refuse to settle for a job that doesn't allow personal and professional development. Thus, to do well and keep your company in a top competitor spot, you'll need to provide training and development for your employees. Still, just doing this is not enough. There are tons of free and paid resources out there that you can use, but the right eLearning course needs to generate a sense of happiness for your staff.
Smiling happy people walking around the office with a cup of fresh espresso isn’t evidence of workplace happiness. Sure, these office traits contribute to office morale. But, positive psychology says there's much more to workplace happiness. There's an actual correlation between employee happiness and business success. More companies are queuing in on this and developing their own training courses for the benefit of employees and the business overall. These efforts reveal some insights into how employee training impacts happiness.
Job Performance
When properly implemented, training and development courses in the workplace can yield long-term benefits for your company. Employees who are happier in their job are more productive. They will contribute to strategic outcomes and deliver higher ROIs.
Presence
An unhappy employee has lower incentives to come into work. Aside from the normal reasons like illness, family issues, and other social pressures, unhappy employees might indulge in absenteeism if their job is not challenging or satisfactory enough. A training and development strategy that focuses on bringing up employee levels of happiness will have a positive, lasting ripple effect for your organization.
Turnover
Employee turnover can be a real problem for a business, regardless of the industry. The higher the turnover, the more money you have to put into retraining new people, and that can get quite expensive. Investing in employee training and development helps your business lower the turnover rate, retain more valuable staff, and ensures employees are happy in the workplace. When you invest in your employees, they invest real time, effort, and brainpower back into the business.
Sure, it's important to train employees in technical skills, but it's actually soft skills that make the greatest impact on the job and work culture. If employees improve their leadership, communication, time management, and collaboration skills, just to name a few, the whole company will run smoother. Make sure that your eLearning course modules provide a practical part to these concepts. It's not enough for employees to understand what leadership, for example, implies. They must also be given the opportunity to put this new knowledge into practice.
There might be repetitive or boring tasks that some employees abhor while others revel in. Find out what employees prefer which type of tasks and delegate them differently based on employee feedback. You might have highly technical employees who might benefit from soft skill development and vice-versa. This way most staff members will feel their skills are put to better use, which in turn makes their job more exciting.
Making room for learning while working full time, spending time with family, and having some 'me' time, is a challenging endeavor. Small, relevant bits of information, delivered at the right time will ensure employees are not feeling overwhelmed by new information and that this habit does not cut into their work hours or free time. A cross-platform eLearning course allows employees to learn while they're in transit, at home, or even during low productivity times at work.
Providing your employees with microlearning modules helps them take charge of their learning. This feeling of being in control of their own learning and decision-making processes will motivate them to perform at higher levels in their job position.
Get management involved. Most people fail at the goals they set up for themselves, not because of lack of motivation or seriousness, but because they fail to construct the right support system that will help them succeed. This is why getting your managers actively involved in employee training and development is so important.
Sit down with your management team and figure out how each of them can contribute to forming a support system for their teams. Make sure you explain that helping their designated team members grow will ultimately take the load off their managerial responsibilities. More independent, problem-solving, and knowledgeable employees means fewer issues to have to manage and less time spent on helping each team member.
Just because you've been doing the same job for a long time doesn't mean you should feel like there's no room for growth in that role. Allowing room for growth, despite the constraints of a particular role, ensures employees continue to have good work experiences. Empowering employees to learn more is not a strategy per se, but it does help change mentalities in the workplace.
You've learned about how to keep your employees happy: efficient training and development. Your next steps are: doing your homework, forming a plan, finding an eLearning vendor, and putting together the right design team. A professional eLearning development team will align your business needs to employee learning goals and get you on a fast-track of change and growth. Contact us today to get started!
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