10 Ways To Keep Your Employees Learning
The best way to keep your employees motivated is to encourage learning at work as much as possible. The more they develop their skills, the more job satisfaction they’ll have. By encouraging your employees to progress, you’ll also make them feel more valued, and this is probably one of the best ways to motivate your staff.
If your employees feel as though they have exciting prospects in the company, they’ll develop a more positive attitude towards working with you for the future. Engaged employees are more likely to work hard, improve their performance, and become valuable assets to your business. As an employer, it’s your responsibility to provide an environment where they can learn and grow as professionals. Here are ten ways to keep your employees learning.
Motivate them with potential opportunities
It can be especially hard nowadays to keep remote workers motivated. Without a physical office, it can sometimes be hard to reach out to your staff, and for them to see what’s really going on in the company. With remote staff more than ever, it’s necessary to motivate them with opportunities.
Communicate with each employee on a regular basis about their career goals and dreams, and try to make these a realistic possibility for them. Assign them projects in the area they want to progress in and don’t stop challenging them. By raising your expectations of them, you’ll be encouraging them to meet these expectations. Make sure they’re fully aware of promotion prospects and other opportunities in the company.
Get them to learn from each other
Ensure your team gets together frequently to share ideas and insights. Mix and match staff members and get them working on new projects together. Ideally, you don’t want things to get stagnant. Encourage each staff member to speak their voice and make sure they are listened to. There are several ways you can encourage networking, and get your employees to learn from each other.
Encourage them to learn from experiences
The best way to learn is by doing the majority of the time. Encourage your staff to learn from new experiences, even if this means taking them out of their comfort zone. These might involve networking opportunities, new projects, or conferences with different companies.
By encouraging them to learn from experience, they’ll develop better skills in a crisis. They’ll be much more comfortable adapting to new situations. Sometimes you’ll actually need to teach your employees how to learn.
Pair them up with experienced staff
Pair junior members of staff with senior members of staff so they’ll receive training automatically on the job. The junior member of staff will have the opportunity to do the leg work in a job that would normally be above their pay grade, with the senior member of staff to supervise and help.
The best way to learn is by teaching somebody else, so your senior members will definitely get something out of it as well. You can even try this with new employees. Training new employees is a great learning experience for the trainer as well.
External training sessions
Do some research into external industry events and external training opportunities for your employees. A change of scenery and perspective can go a long way when it comes to learning. Your employees will be far more inspired to find out about the industry, rather than when they’re stuck in the same office all day. You can find things like trade shows by industry easily online for example.
Encourage online courses
Never get in the way if your employees want to continue studying, in fact, this is something you should encourage. There are a variety of courses available online from undergraduate courses to continuing professional development to Master’s degrees and higher qualifications.
Give them access to these courses and promote them in the workplace. If your business has the resources, you could even sponsor their education. Highly educated employees will be a lot more valuable to your business in the future.
Personal development plans
It’s essential to have a personal development plan in place for each and every employee. This way you’ll have a better understanding of what they want to work towards. You can then align their plans with your business goals in a mutually beneficial way.
You can find templates for personal development plans online. These are a great way to motivate your staff by outlining the incentives involved in achieving their personal goals. In your employee reviews, encourage them to give feedback as well about which tools you can provide to help them develop certain skills and reach their goals.
Engage their curiosity
You want your employees to ask as many questions as possible. A curious employee is more motivated to learn. Curiosity is vital to an organization’s performance, according to research. When our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more creative solutions. It also helps to cultivate an interest in learning more about how the company functions.
Hands-on customer experience
Direct experience with customers is a great way for your employees to learn more about your business. Customer experience is a direct result of employee experience. In order to provide better customer service, you need more engaged employees.
In order to create an encouraging and motivating environment for your employees, you need to bring the customer experience and employee experience closer together.
Learning mobile apps
There are several great apps for corporate training. This industry is on the rise and further growth is anticipated in the next few years. Many people nowadays connect more with mobile or app-based learning. Employees will also be more in control of their learning environment. You can customize learning solutions on these types of apps, and you’ll save a lot of money on overheads.
There are many ways you can motivate your employees to keep learning, remotely or otherwise. The trick is to keep shaking things up and to encourage them with new experiences. It’ll increase morale as well as performance.
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