6 Tips To Convince Your Team To Adopt A New Online Training Platform

6 Tips To Convince Your Team To Adopt A New Online Training Platform
Summary: Creating a memorable launch event and animating the usage through competition, recognition, and development is key to ensure the success of your eLearning initiative.

How To Convince Your Team To Adopt A New Online Training Platform

When we talk about developing teams it is easy to find those individuals who do not want to further develop their careers or enhance their competencies through training programs or formal education; they are happy with what they are doing and they do not want to change. In many companies this seems to be a big challenge, and it is commonly one of the reasons why the Learning and Development initiatives lose their momentum. Moreover this is the case when we approach the eLearning solution to our Learning and Development needs, this seems to be the least attractive type of training team members tend to enjoy.

One of the most challenging obstacles faced when planning to use any eLearning platform is how to get the buy-in from team members and keep them motivated to continuously access the training courses. The lack of usage represents a setback when developing learning strategies for an organization. When you have historical data showing that the team members are not accessing and completing training courses through your learning platform, it discourages investment in this area and organizations tend to go back to the infamous "PPT+Classroom" combo solutions.

Innovative initiatives such as gamification and other contemporary learning practices are becoming more popular, however without the insertion of these practices through a well-planned strategy the company's efforts seem to go to waste.

In this sense, it is hard to think about an ideal form of implementation; however when we consider successful models available we can trace a few similarities that go as follows:

1. Organize Exciting Launch Events

When a company decides do use some eLearning solution for their development needs, it is crucial that when this initiative is communicated to the team, it needs to have a "wow" factor, something to make this experience memorable to the team and that they can relate to every time they think about their development. Therefore, when we look at companies that have managed to successfully implement digital learning platforms, we can see that it all began with an amazing release event, where the team members got excited about this new tool.

2. Link Training With Career Development

Most successful learning initiatives are tightly linked to a career progression curriculum, where companies draw a succession plan based on previous training courses completed. As such, many organizations have created, during the planning stages, a learning pathway to ensure that if any given team member wants to qualify and apply for a promotion they would have to complete a certain number of training courses related to the new position.

3. Create Healthy Competition

It is clear that creating a healthy competition environment motivates team members to use the platform and to check and compare their development with each other. That's why many platforms have scoring and progression elements to it where users can compare results and managers can check progress.

4. Recognize And Award Performance

When team members achieve a certain score or progress to a set stage of the training program, successful organizations tend to recognize and reward this performance. This initiative has proven to be highly effective when animating the usage of a training platform for a long period of time. Individuals tend to see recognition as motivation to continue with a habit or an activity, and this is priceless in terms of learning initiatives.

5. Create A Learning Culture

There are many other activities that could be listed here as motivation for team members to use learning platforms, however the most important aspect would have to be the creation of a learning culture throughout the company. Most companies ask their team members to develop their knowledge, enhance their competencies or acquire new skills through learning initiatives; however the management and executive teams are not following through with how this would impact the bottom line or their colleagues’ careers. This attitude has a negative impact on the teams' openness to development solutions. Therefore it is crucial for any learning initiative to work to have the whole company working together to ensure learning is as much of a daily activity as reading emails.

6. Make It Fun

As Learning and Development professionals it is our duty to ensure that our initiatives are fun and enjoyable, even more so when we talk about eLearning or virtual classes. Gamification came as the most reasonable solution to this problem, as it motivates users by taping into their inner child and making it a inconspicuous learning experience.