Benefits Of Online Employee Training
The benefits of online employee training are many and well documented. They include
- Convenience for the employee
- Global reach + fast delivery of training
- Cost-effectiveness and maximizing your training investment
- Fewer employee accidents + mistakes
- Delivery of consistent information
- Ability to enhance training outcomes with blended learning
- Getting new employees up to speed faster
- A personalized experience + localized content
Convenience For the Employee
One of the significant benefits of online employee training is greater flexibility. Your employees can take the training at a time that’s convenient to them. Whether that’s during work time, at a coffee shop, or after hours.
Global Reach + Fast Delivery Of Online Employee Training
With online employee training, you can reach many geographically disbursed workers in a short space of time. And with minimal extra effort. Another of the benefits is the speed of delivery. It is far quicker to deliver online employee training to thousands of people than in-person training. This time-to-scale means that you can develop an online employee solution and deploy it rapidly.
Cost-Effectiveness And Maximizing Your Training Investment
Making the leap to online employee training might seem a bit daunting. But we’ve helped dozens of organizations make the switch. And one of the significant benefits is the added efficiencies and improvement in your training investment. After an initial up-front investment, your costs of delivery are minimal. Spread out over the lifetime of the training, the costs savings are significant. And you’re not limited by the size of venue, travel budgets, or scheduling constraints.
Online employee training benefits also include an increase in the productivity of your employees. And well-trained employees are more aware of expectations, and duties, so they need less supervision—all contributing to cost-effectiveness and maximizing your investment.
Fewer Accidents + Mistakes
Training provides employees with the knowledge and skills to do their job well. And it can help prevent and reduce costly accidents or errors on the job.
Delivery Of Consistent Information
When developing online employee training, your workforce receives the correct information and the same high-quality learning experience as everyone else. Online learning provides that consistency. Custom online employee training can deliver role-specific knowledge for particular individuals, teams, or groups within your workforce. Each role receives consistent information.
Ability To Enhance Training Outcomes With Blended Learning
By investing in engaging online employee training, you can create a higher-quality learning experience. Employees can receive feedback and coaching to reinforce their experiences with a blended approach. And it leads to elevated learning outcomes and application in their roles.
Getting New Employees Up To Speed Faster
When you hire a new employee or take on a new role, you want them to become productive as quickly as possible. Online employee training and onboarding can help accelerate their time to competency. And it doesn’t need a lot of face time with their supervisor. Allowing them to contribute faster. Onboarding, for example, could be an on-demand format while you supplement their new knowledge with coaching and feedback.
A Personalized Experience + Localized Content
Another benefit of modern online employee training is providing a very personalized experience. For instance, it can incorporate nuances of specific roles. But it can also respond to an individual’s circumstances and level of expertise. Although online employee training programs can have a global reach, you can customize them to include regional and local content.
Types Of Online Employee Training
There are many types of employee training that we assist organizations with, including:
- Onboarding new employees
- Software training for new systems or upgraded systems
- Employee sales training
- Skills-based training for employee advancement
- Safety training
- Compliance training
- Soft skills training
- Technical training
- Supervisory and management training
- Process, procedural, and product training
- Sales productivity and skills
- Customer service and satisfaction
In creating online employee training, there are also many options to consider, including
- On-demand courses
- Virtual instructor-led training
- Email drip courses
- Pre-work for live discussions
- Videos
- Interactive videos
- Simulations
- Microlearning
- Podcasts
- Infographics + job aids
- Case studies and examples
- Coaching + mentoring
- Blended learning
Which combination you choose depends upon the nature of the subject matter. And the circumstances of the employees to determine the best fit.
Overcoming Organization Challenges Using Online Employee Training
Organizations face many challenges that are occurring at a faster pace than ever before. Below are 8 of the most common challenges our clients face and how online employee training can help overcome them.
Regulatory Changes
Regulatory changes can have far-reaching impacts on organizations. And are occurring with increasing frequency. Is your organization subject to either large-scale regulatory changes or periodic changes to existing regulations? If so, online employee training solutions can help. Significant regulatory changes demand systematic and precise education and training of employees to the new regimen. Since regulations often take several months to come into force, you can be ready with a comprehensive training program when that date comes into effect. And if periodic changes to existing regulations occur, those changes are quickly included in a current online employee training program. While updates to those already trained can be sent, advising employees of the changes and new requirements.
Technological Advancements
Technology continues to advance at a rapid rate. So if your organization relies on critical technology or software, updates and new versions can become problematic. But online employee training is ideal in such situations. For example, e-learning tools exist for educating people about technology and application changes. Where actual screen recordings of using the technology can form training simulations, ask us how we can reduce the training burden from your technology changes.
Time To Onboard New Employees
It’s always a struggle to find and hire talented new employees. But when you do, now you have to onboard them. And how many of us have the time to dedicate to that fully? So many organizations bombard new employees with a wealth of information to wade through in the first week and call it orientation. But 40% of new employees leave an organization within the first year because of poor job training.
Yet a well-designed online employee training program can significantly reduce information overload. While also delivering on training goals. And it reduces the in-person time required while providing an exceptional onboarding experience. In particular self-paced, on-demand courses allow employees to work through materials at their own pace. And at a time that’s convenient to them.
As well, using microlearning approaches can also avoid information overload. For example, create follow-up reinforcement with a schedule of periodic short videos, job aids, or checklists. These reinforce learning over time. Also, conducting a pre-assessment before employees receive training can significantly help. If employees are already knowledgeable about specific topics, then those topics don’t need to be covered in detail. Thus, reducing the time required to complete the online employee training.
“A recent survey says, 40% of employees leave the organization within the first year when they receive poor job training. “
Employee Engagement
Seventy-eight percent of organizations are currently implementing an employee engagement program as one of their primary strategies. Like most strategies, however, employee engagement doesn’t happen overnight. It requires consistent efforts over a long time. And based upon the results of a recent survey there’s a lot more work required. The survey showed that employee engagement globally has decreased to 15%. And since engaged employees provide 202% greater productivity than those non actively engaged, the opportunity cost is massive.
Online employee training can be one consistent, long-term tool to help increase employee engagement. It’s been shown that employees with learning and development opportunities are more engaged and happier in their jobs.
“Staff training is vitally important in increasing employee engagement. Employees feel valued through career enhancement and development, which therefore increases motivation to achieve company objectives,”
Rachel Allen, head of people & culture at BPS World.
Lack Of A Skilled Or Experienced Workforce
In today’s working climate hiring talented employees is often a significant challenge. So many organizations are actively looking to increase existing employees’ experience and upskill them to take on more responsibility or specialized roles. Online employee training programs can help by providing extra education to enhance technical or leadership skills. And for larger organizations, their programs are so that a cohort of employees proceed through the program together.
At the very least online employee training provides more development opportunities to employees. And these can be designed to form a formal program with extra modules, role-playing scenarios, and coaching and mentoring options. And not only does this help address some of the talent gaps, but it also helps retain employees and increases employee engagement.
Retention Of Employees
A hyper-competitive labor market will continue to be a challenge for the current workforce. So it’s more important than ever to retain your employees. One
fundamental way to do this is to offer learning and development opportunities to employees. LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report showed a whopping 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. First, understanding your employee’s needs and future interests is essential. Then match those with creating opportunities, and provide support for them to expand their skills and knowledge. Over time building up a suite of online employee training modules to take on-demand provides the greatest flexibility to meet these needs.
Embracing Soft-Skills Such As Diversity At Work
Expectations have evolved, and a diverse workforce will soon define the modern workplace. A recent study by LinkedIn learning showed that the #1 priority for employees was training on soft-skills development. That matches well with organizations whose top priorities are improving leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. Such as providing online employee training in diversity at work. Diversity in the workforce requires a multipronged approach, including an appropriate culture and hiring practices. And a pre-requisite for many organizations is diversity workshops.
“The workforce agrees, training for soft skills is the #1 priority.”
LinkedIn Learning Survey, 2018
Retaining Customers Using Online Employee Training
Another top challenge that is positively affected by online employee training is the retention of customers. Providing employees with the knowledge and skills to provide exceptional customer service directly increases customer retention. And educating your customers about your products and services also significantly increases customer retention.
Building Capacity Within Your Organization
At Spark + Co., our focus is to work with our clients collaboratively as trusted partners. So we aim to help clients build up their training capacity and competencies to manage functions that we may initially perform for them. That’s assuming they want to! So, one of the outcomes of us working with your internal team is that we coach, mentor, and help educate your team. So they are better able to manage their employee training ongoing.
For help with your online employee training project or questions you have, contact us or book a free consultation.
