A 2012 survey by the American Society of Training & Development (now known as the Association of Talent Development) discovered that nearly two-thirds of responding workers believe that the quality of training and learning offered by their employers positively influenced personal engagement in their jobs. As most companies know, employees who are more engaged are generally more productive—as well as less likely to bolt on a whim.
Some companies turn to employee training software with the hopes of creating better-informed workers. This strategy is worthwhile, but it does not always provide the automatic boost that training departments hope for. How you use employee training software matters. A smart, proactive approach can produce noticeable results, but the solution can’t do all the work.
Here are the top four mistakes, in no particular order, that companies must avoid when using employee training software:
Not updating content
Training processes are rarely static; they evolve as processes improve, technology is upgraded, new products are introduced, and so on. Failing to update and improve the content delivered by employee training software results workers learning things that are already obsolete. There was a time when updating training content was a chore, but today’s solutions make it really easy. Documents can be amended and instantly delivered to the devices from which employees will view content. With an iPad or Surface, shooting training video is simple for even the most technically challenged manager.
Access issues
Not every employee needs access to every piece of training content. Yet with some solutions, that is exactly what happens: Workers are directed to learn from a file but can’t find it among dozens of folders and thousands of documents. They finally give up and decide just to wing it. Furthermore, with too much access, content “escaping” a company’s control is far too easy—do you want your training processes in the hands of a competitor? Alternately, when an employee wants or needs to learn something, he or she requires access to the training content. Today’s tablet-based solutions allow managers to efficiently provide that access. The employee turns on an iPad to find the content already there.
Too much cloud
Cloud-based programs are emerging as today’s dominant approach to a wide array of applications across almost every industry. Training would seem to be a natural fit for this approach, but beware: The cloud is not always the best solution. Security is always an issue, but a bigger concern is the enormous strain accessing files and streaming training video has on the bandwidth of a retail environment. A store or restaurant can’t afford to have its systems slow down just because a few employees are watching training videos. Tablet-based employee training software automatically downloads content (at off-peak times, if desired) onto devices to reside locally. Workers viewing such content never use the cloud because the files they need are already on the iPad.
Discouraging feedback
In today’s era of increased workplace collaboration, employee feedback is important during the training process. No company would admit that it doesn’t take its employees’ opinions seriously, yet some solutions don’t offer a means for those workers to offer those opinions. These employees either must resort to email to contact a training manager with a question or simply stay silent and feel disengaged. The best employee training software includes the ability to send and receive messages directly through the solution, and directly attached to the specific content. That kind of collaboration is never a mistake.
What mistakes have you made or encountered with your company’s employee training software?
