Employee training is crucial for any business’ growth and success. Investing in employees’ growth and devising a superior employee training program can be highly beneficial. It can lead to increased employee satisfaction, higher employee retention, and ultimately better ROI for your business. Some key statistics are proof of that:
- 68% of employees believe that training is any company’s most important policy.
- 40% of employees with poor training experience are bound to leave a company within its first year.
- And lastly, a whopping 74% of employees believe that they have not reached their fullest potential!
The above stats clearly showcase the fact that companies who fail to invest in their employees’ training and development are most likely leading towards failure.
In this article, you’ll find some effective tactics that you can use to create the best possible employee training program for your company.
Why Is an Employee Training Program Important for the Success of Your Business?
Devising a high-quality employee training program is the wisest business decision you can make today.
If you already have one in place then you are probably looking for ways to make it better. It is first important to understand how a top-notch employee training program can impact your business:
1. Better Employee Satisfaction Leading to Increased Productivity
When you devise a good training program for your employees, you show them that you have their best interests in mind.
By undergoing training programs, your employees will feel more positive and confident about their careers. This experience will massively increase your employees’ satisfaction index.
Happy employees tend to be more invested in your company and believe that your company’s growth contributes to their professional growth. This is why, the more the number of satisfied employees you have, the more you will see an increase in the overall productivity of your company.
2. Increased Employee Retention Rate
This circles back to the previous point which states that when businesses invest in the growth of their employees, employees feel more positively about their employers. This becomes a perfect win-win situation for both the company and the employees.
When you invest in employees’ training, they will understand that you value them more. Hence, both the employees and the company grow together, leading to a significant reduction in employee retention rates.
3. Better Company Reputation
Good employees are always on the lookout for companies that are willing to spend their budget on employees’ growth and development. Hence, by putting a good training program in place, you’ll be attracting a huge number of good employees.
This will ultimately contribute to the betterment of your business.
Actionable Tips to Create a Superior Employee Training Program
By now, you probably understand the benefits of having an employee training program. Let’s look at some effective ways to create the best possible training program for your employees (or enhance the existing one.)
1. Identity the Existing Gaps
Irrespective of whether you already have a training program or not, it is essential that you start by evaluating the current state of your business.
You should know what is missing and what are the needs of the employees. Only then you will be able to design the best possible training program based on that.
- Start by interviewing your employees. Understand their pain points and needs. Conduct a thorough survey of your employees to understand how and what would they like to be trained on.
- Understand what types of skills are your employees most interested in training about. Types of skills may be technical skills, communication skills, leadership skills, collaboration skills, or any other role-specific skills.
- What are the current tools and training materials shared with your employees? What skills are these training materials lacking? What are the things that need to be added to create a comprehensive training program?
- Assess your company’s needs. Are you lacking in a particular area or department? Are you looking to empower your employees with certain skills that would benefit your organization and help you achieve your business goals quicker?
- Interview your company’s managers or other people in leadership positions. Understand their point of view about the current state of your company. What major skills gaps do managers observe in their teams?
- Think about new areas in your industry towards which you would want your company to expand. Is there a new area of growth that you would like your employees to explore?
2. Set up Goals and Objectives
Starting by setting up goals and objectives that you want to achieve with your employee training program is crucial. This is because, without having clear objectives, you will never be able to measure the success of your training programs.
These goals will act as your north star as you design, implement, and evaluate your employee training program.
- Set goals for the employees’ performance after they complete this program. What kind of goals do you want each of your employees to achieve that will benefit the company.
- Also, set goals for your employee satisfaction index and employee retention rates. Measuring this would give you helpful insights for the betterment of your training programs in the coming years.
- It is also important to set up goals for new employees. What are the objectives that you want to achieve with your onboarding training program? What are the key areas that you want your employees to be skilled in right from the start?
- It is also a good idea to set goals that would have a direct impact on your customers. For example, what improvement do you want to see in your employees who are in customer-facing roles? These goals can be – reduced number of customer complaints, increased customer satisfaction index, or increased visibility.
3. Choose the Right Tools
Using the right training method and platform is key to a successful employee training program. Employee expectations and market needs have changed over the past few years, especially in the post-COVID era.
Instructor-led training is an outdated approach. Most businesses are moving towards more automated forms of training programs. Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) are increasingly being used to make employee training programs more effective and fruitful.
- Using a compelling employee onboarding platform that enables you to assign specific call-to-action to your new employees based on their roles, create self-paced guided tours, design interactive application walkthroughs, and help employees grow their expertise can be truly transformational to your company’s growth.
- Ensure that you invest in tools that help you design flexible, customizable, and mobile-friendly employee onboarding programs. You should look for tools that can help you create customized guidance flows for employees, let you assign and track employee tasks, and encourage your employees to enhance their skills.
4. Design and Create Training Content
The next logical step is to design your training program. This can be a time-consuming process based on the number of employees you have and the number of skills that you want to train your employees on.
- Divide your program based on different types of skills such as communication skills, technical skills, leadership skills, soft skills, etc. You should also categorize your training based on the level of the employees’ expertise. For example, a new employee’s training program would be different as compared to an employee who has a few years of experience in your company.
- Create extensive training materials for each of the training categories that you have decided on. Ensure that the team responsible for creating training material spends a good amount of time creating in-depth content whilst having the training goals in mind.
- Ensure that the training program also includes innovative elements such as group learning sessions, role-playing, hands-on experience, collaborative learning, and rewards for milestones achieved with the training.
- You can make the training program a lot more fun by gamifying the experience. Create games and incentives to be won at the end. This will build up a healthy competition amongst your employees and they will look forward to learning more.
5. Analyze the Results
Measuring the success of your employee training program should be an integral part of the process. Only with timely feedback, analysis of results, and continual improvement, you’ll be able to create the best possible employee training program.
- You can survey your employees and gather constructive feedback from them about the various aspects of your training program. These may include the survey on things such as the depth of the content, the quality of the program, tools used, delivery of the program, and employees’ satisfaction. This will give you useful insights on how you can make improvements to the training program to make it better.
- Track analytics such as sign-ins, activity times, employee task completion rates, times per session, and similar metrics to get an overall understanding of how well the program is resonating with your employees.
- Lastly, measure the important success metrics such as employee performance, client satisfaction rates, employee satisfaction index, employee retention rate, etc. to measure the overall ROI from your employee training programs.
Conclusion
Improving your employee training program can be highly profitable for your business. It can lead to happier employees and create a culture of positivity in your workspace.
But, it’s time for you to get rid of outdated training programs and adopt more new-age technologies. Advanced tools driven by technologies such as AI, AR, and VR will give you the maximum ROI from your training programs.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.