How To Make Training More Fun For Your Employees

If you run a business and you have employees, training is something you need to factor into your schedule. When you train your team, a number of positive things will happen. To begin with, you’ll have employees with all the skills – at the right level – that you need to help your business move forward. They’ll be able to do their jobs more efficiently, and they’ll be able to help customers more successfully. All of this means more sales and bigger profits for your business. 

As well as this, training will show your team that you care about their prospects and overall happiness. It shows that you are looking out for them and that you want them to succeed just as much as they do. The more you can help them realize their ambitions – often through good training – the better for everyone. 

Yet training can be dull. A lot of the time, it’s a case of everyone sitting in a room listening to  someone talk, after which they’ll be given a certificate. Of course, this boring kind of training won’t help them learn, and it won’t make them happy. With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to make training more fun for your employees. 

Outsource 

Many business owners assume that they will be the ones who have to train their team, and that’s especially true if that business owner is an expert in something or at least has a lot of experience. However, this might not be the best option; it could be better to outsource. 

Although this is more costly than doing it yourself, when you outsource your training, you have the chance to choose from a variety of different companies and determine which one is going to be the most informative and – crucially – entertaining. Remember that the more your team enjoys their training, the more they will remember. 

Remember too that outsourcing is not necessarily a case of getting an external team to do literally everything. It might be more of a sharing opportunity, instead. In fact, this is a great approach to take if you want to make sure that you are making the most of the situation. A good example of this kind of partnership would be to use Workforce Tuition Assistance in training your staff. That can be a great way to outsource without losing control over the overall processes involved.

It’s even more important to outsource if you don’t have the skills to teach your employees yourself. If you’re not up to date on corporate first aid training, for example, it would be best to find a company that is to train your staff. You can also sit in on the training, which will help you learn and show your team that you think what they are learning is important. Lead by example when you run a business, and success will be easier to achieve. 

Try Micro-Learning 

One of the issues that your team might have with training is that it takes up a whole day. This can eat into their productivity and cause issues with deadlines and sales, not to mention the fact that, if the training is not all that interesting, it can take a lot of effort to focus for an entire day or even half a day. 

Therefore, it could be a good idea to try micro-learning. Micro-learning is the process of taking one topic and breaking it down into very short (around ten minutes would be ideal) lessons. You could do this as often as makes sense; one topic might take two or three weeks to learn, but since the lessons are very short, you could offer one every day.

Make it a regular event, and everyone will make time for it – it could even start to become an interesting and enjoyable break away from their workload, helping them to be more productive when they get back to it. 

Leave The Office 

Do you remember how excited you would get when there was a field trip organized in elementary or even high school? Just the idea of getting out of the familiar building and away from the familiar routine was enough to make anything you were going to learn about more fascinating. It’s highly likely you’ll still remember at least some of those trips and the things you learned to this day. 

The same will be true if you organize off-site training for your team. This might be going to a specialist training center to be taught by experts, or it could be going to a team-building activity center. It might even be a day you’ve organized to help people get to know one another better. 

The point is that getting out of the office for a short while and being trained in whatever way is going to suit the situation can make it a lot more fun and ultimately more memorable. 

Use Video 

Studies show that video is a great way to make training more fun. We can remember fifty percent of what we see and hear compared to thirty percent of images we see and only ten percent of the text we read. 

By adding videos to your training, you make it easier for whoever is doing the training, which is a definite benefit if you’re doing this in-house, but you also make the information more entertaining, and the lessons will stick for longer.