Across the business world, companies are seeing problems and costs associated with traditional ways of hiring, training and assessing their employees. There are new trends in the vital day to day operations of your business that can increase the flexibility of your management and provide a cost-effective way to enhance the product knowledge of your staff. These center mostly on providing a systemic approach to mobile-ready learning systems that incorporate videos, microlearning strategies and the ability to assess the effectiveness of your training. Exploring these new trends in effective learning management can be one of the ways your company can improve your staff and thus customer retention.
Mobile-Ready Technology
Smartphones are the most prevalent form of technology in everyone's pocket today. By implementing mobile-ready software that your employees are familiar with, you can facilitate training in any setting. Information can be easily accessed by the trainee, facilitated and even tested to assess knowledge retention. All with the flexibility of a hand-held device. Mobile-ready technology can be seamlessly integrated and updated with your current format of training.
Video-Enabled Training
Learning through watching videos has become a mainstay in the retail, restaurant and many other industries. How many of us have watched a YouTube™ video on how to fix something in our own home?
The same learning methodology can be applied to one of your systemic processes for your staff. Information retention rates hover around 10% following traditional face to face training sessions, whereas retention rates improve to over 25% after an employee interacts with a video on the same topic. If you want someone to learn a process the way you want to teach them, video-enabled training can offer a reliably consistent format with above average retention rates.
Content Management
Consistency of service and product is essential to retaining a loyal customer base. This thought process should also be applied to how we organize and implement training our management and staff. The ability to manage the content you want tenured and newly incoming staff to learn is an added bonus to all levels of your organization. If you want a new process to be trained and coached in several locations, it only requires updating the information on your end. This new training process can then be facilitated in all locations, regardless of the distance between them. The training will be consistent and able to be modified at your discretion, then implemented immediately. Our guide How to Maintain Brand Consistency While Growing Your Restaurant offers more great tips.
Microlearning Strategies
Microlearning involves breaking up information into smaller chunks in order to increase the retention rate on that specific skill. These short bursts of information can be focused on any type of learning platform. They can be utilized to avoid what is often an overwhelming amount of information and be broken down into manageable bites of information. The attention span of employees comes with a wide array of results, using technology you can target an observed weakness with a focused training on any employee until that information is retained.
Paperless Performance Assessments
The goal of any effective learning management strategy is to enhance the ability of your staff to properly execute procedures in the process of serving your customers. Using an online training program, you can get immediate feedback on how effective that training was for any particular employee. Every employee has strengths and weaknesses, online performance assessments can help you determine who needs more training in a particular area, and who has completed that training successfully.
New Training Trends
Every organization must possess the capabilities to train their talent in an organized, methodical way and that allows them to assess its effectiveness. Moving away from face to face or traditional modes of training and into a mobile-ready online training system is where the future lies. It is flexible for all staff of all learning speeds. It is cost-effective in that it allows for immediate feedback for who needs more in depth training and who does not.
