How To Facilitate Emotional Intelligence In Corporate eLearning
Emotional intelligence involves self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal skills. It's the ability to understand your own feelings and how they affect your actions and behaviors. An individual with a high degree of emotional intelligence is able to lead the team effectively and resolve conflicts with ease. This is because they acknowledge and respect the emotions of those around them. As such, it's an essential trait for your employees to have, regardless of their position or job responsibilities. Here are 7 top tips to help you foster emotional intelligence in your corporate eLearning program.
1. Encourage Online Group Collaboration
One of the most effective ways to facilitate emotional intelligence is to incorporate online group projects. This gives employees the power to interact with their peers in a team setting. Thus, they are exposed to a broad range of emotions, opinions, and perspectives. Give them a problem to solve or a task to perform. Then allow them to choose a team leader who assigns specific roles and responsibilities. Online group collaboration involves a variety of interpersonal skills and abilities, such as active listening, empathy, compassion, and open communication.
2. Create Emotionally-Compelling Case Studies
Case studies and real-world examples emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace. For example, how being aware of others' emotions helps employees provide better customer service. Studies and stories also create an emotional connection with corporate learners, as they allow staff to reflect on past experiences and tie emotional intelligence into real world applications. For instance, the case study explores how high emotional intelligence EQs lead to more effective team building. Employees can think back on team projects they've had in the past from an emotional intelligence standpoint. Did they respect the emotions of their team members? Were they able to keep their own emotions in-check?
3. Include Branching Scenarios That Test Social Skills
Branching scenarios involve decisions making paths that lead to different outcomes. You can create branching scenarios that feature customer personas, co-workers, or other online training characters to test social skills. For example, an employee must appease an angry customer by identifying their needs and empathizing with their situation. They must also evaluate and manage their own emotions to stay calm during the transaction. Branching scenarios allow employees to see the consequences of their actions and behaviors, as well. Which helps to improve their approach and analyze their personal emotional intelligence abilities.
4. Develop An Emotional Intelligence Self-Assessment
Are your employees aware of their own emotions? Can they decipher the emotions of others in order to achieve a favorable outcome? An emotional intelligence self-assessment gives an employee the opportunity to evaluate their own emotional intelligence quotients. As such, they can identify areas for improvement. For example, they need to work on recognizing their own emotions and how it impacts their co-workers. In addition to quantitative assessment methods, such as multiple choice exams, you can also use online training simulations, branching scenarios, and other interactive online training tools to assess their emotional intelligence.
5. Incorporate Character-Based Serious Games
Serious games are fun, interactive, and engaging. But they are also great emotional intelligence diagnostic tools that build real world experience, especially when they feature emotionally-centered stories and interesting characters. For example, customer personas that involve unique personality types and challenges. Develop serious games that focus on a specific emotional intelligence trait, such as active listening and empathy. Or the ability to manage emotions in problem-solving situations. The game can feature levels, points, obstacles, and other game mechanics. Just make sure that the online training characters and rewards don't overshadow the primary objective, which is to build emotional intelligence in a real world context.
6. Add Social Media Activities To Your Online Training Strategy
Social learning activities provide similar benefits to online group collaboration projects. However, they follow a less formal approach. Employees can ask questions, share ideas, and interact with co-workers via social media. Thus, they are exposed to a variety of different viewpoints, beliefs, and opinions. Online forums, corporate eLearning blogs, and social media groups are all great ways to facilitate emotional intelligence in online training. However, you must set some ground rules so that employees get the most from the online training experience. For example, stress the importance of respecting the ideas of others. Or encourage employees to evaluate the weight of words before leaving a reply.
7. Use Online Training Simulations To Mimic Real World Pressure
Online training simulations place employees in real-world situations, without the risk. They can interact with co-workers and clients in order to build their communication and interpersonal skills. However, they also have the opportunity to test their emotional intelligence when under pressure. Applying small doses of real-world stress may expose areas for improvement and highlight strengths. Here are 2 additional tips to create online training simulations that put emotional intelligence abilities to the test:
a. Include Realistic Visuals And Sounds To Enhance Immersion
Visuals, sound effects, and even background music set the emotional tone. Thus, employees are able to fully immerse themselves in the online training simulation and feel the real world tension. For example, images of the workplace or job-related tools they use on a daily basis. This also helps them to apply what they've learned in the real world, as they're already putting their knowledge into practice.
b. Use Employee Research To Create Personalized Online Training Simulations
Employees have different performance gaps, skills, and emotional intelligence levels. Which is why you must research their individual needs to create personalized online training materials. Use their Emotional Intelligence self-assessments and branching scenario results to design targeted situations, challenges, and character personas.
Emotional Intelligence is one of the most challenging traits to develop, as it involves personal cognitions and emotional awareness. However, these 7 tips can help you facilitate emotional intelligence in your corporate eLearning course in order to help employees achieve their goals. Thus, you can provide your staff with the professional knowledge in a supportive and nurturing online training environment.
How does emotional intelligence really effect eLearning experiences? Read the article The Impact Of Emotional Intelligence In eLearning to learn about the significant impact of emotional intelligence in eLearning course design.
