Making Online Workforce Training Fun
The initial drama surrounding the new setup has phased off and it is already the tenth month of this pandemic year. Now the onus is on the big online corporate trainers to make the online training more effective and most importantly, more engaging. But the question is how to go about it?
Communicate The Agenda
Communicating the training agenda, either via email or by WhatsApp, injects a sense of purpose amongst participants. They will know what they will be up for during the training session and it will give them some additional energy. Your LMS can be integrated with multiple messenger systems like WhatsApp Chat, Facebook Messenger, etc., where you can directly send learners instant texts about the agenda for either the day’s or week’s training.
Keep It Short
The training session can be long but you must break it down into meaningful pieces so that the participants can enjoy a little hiatus in order to absorb and comprehend the information. Long live training sessions or long recorded videos can prove to be boring. The participants can lose their focus and concentration thereby not meeting the learning objectives in general. That is why it is essential that the entire training session should be segmented into smaller parts in order to retain employee focus. Your LMS should allow you to add multiple lectures in each of the courses.
Encourage Participation Through Gamification And Discussion Boards
This is perhaps the most important aspect of the engagement strategy. In order to keep your online learners motivated, you need to make them participate. Long training hours without any actionable outcome can defeat the purpose of the training. Your LMS should support various gamification props in order to tempt the learners to conduct digital actions thereby instantly checking their reactions on the screen. Moreover, an interactive discussion board will also come in handy as it will give the learner an option to ask questions and enter into debates with fellow training program participants. Your LMS should also ideally provide you with a proper discussion board with the content of each lecture so that it is visible to all parties involved.
Offer Realistic Learning Incentives
Online corporate training during the lockdown needs more incentives because employees are not entirely motivated all the time. This is a major problem when it comes to working and learning from home, especially for employees who are not used to this. For that very reason, online training modules should ideally replicate some realistic goals. Online trainers must communicate these goals in advance in order to keep online learners on track. The learning modules should ideally put forward rewards at every turn to keep the learners going; they can be points or scores or even career-based alternatives.
Inject Fun Elements Into Training
Putting Call-To-Action elements in your training module might prove to be fruitful, especially when you are trying to keep the mature learners engaged. The actionable items will lure them to be more involved in the learning process thereby increasing the amount of engagement. It is important that online trainers now include more and more actionable elements in the training instead of posting an hour-long video. This is due to the fact that the attention span of learners has reduced considerably during this stressful time of the pandemic.
Measure Engagement
One cannot ensure the total engagement of online learners without ensuring a proper measuring index. It is essential to find out which of your corporate learners is spending more time on the given lecturers and who is missing out on important details. Experts predict that quiz scores are not enough to understand whether learners were actually engaged during the tenure of the online course. Measurement indexes like how much time spent on each lecture or whether or not the learners have gone to the end of the video/audio/file are good indicators. Moreover, engagement can be ensured if the online corporate trainer has the provision of checking how much time each and every online learner has spent on each lecture along with the stats pertaining to their respective participation in the lecture. This kind of detailed information will help the corporate trainer to determine which online learners need more attention than the rest.
Tally With Organization’s Learning Objective
Each and every organization conducting an online training program has certain training goals and objectives in mind. They need to observe measurable outcomes at the end of each training session. Starting from improvement in employee performance to an increase in staff motivation, there can be a wide variety of learning objectives. Experts believe that in the time of the pandemic employees will require more motivation when it comes to their training needs.
