How To Leverage Your Brand In Training
Corporate identity is what differentiates your company from your competitors. As such, it should act like a framework that indicates your goals, your organizational culture, and your biggest strengths. Although you might take it for granted, your brand could be your biggest ally in employee training.
Training employees is about more than just ticking compliance boxes. It’s the training manager’s job to help every employee become the best they can be, both for the organization and for their own professional development. To do that, they also need to show every employee what it means to be a part of the company.
How Your Brand Affects Training
When companies are creating their identity, they have the mammoth task of condensing everything they stand for into a brand. This includes things like their color palette, their logo, and their motto. With a well-defined brand, any customer can get an idea of the company’s values at a glance.
These subconscious cues work just as well with employees. If your training is aligned with your brand, every learning objective is framed in the context of the organization. Studies have shown that learning is easier to retain and engage with when it has relevance for the learner. By making the content more relevant, there’s a better chance that it will have the desired impact.
Aside from making the training more effective, your brand also gives a focus for all the content. But doing this, you can maintain consistency across everything your training department produces. This reduces the possibility of conflicting or confusing messages which might hinder the training.
How Can You Leverage Your Brand In Training?
As you can see, it’s important not to overlook the company’s corporate identity when creating a training initiative. By incorporating your brand, you can create a training experience that really matters to your employees. Here are just a few tips to help you put your company’s stamp on your learning.
1. Make Sure Your Learning Management System Is Branded
If your Learning Management System doesn’t reflect your organization, your learners will see it as an external system. Although that won’t ruin your entire training program, it misses a lot of opportunities to communicate the organizational culture. Learning platforms have come a long way from simply letting you add your company logo. You can take advantage of customization options on a Learning Management System to change the color scheme, adapt the language and add fully branded banners to the homepage. With a learning platform that reflects your corporate identity, you can create the perfect online environment for your people.
2. Brand Your Training Content
It’s all very well to have a branded learning platform, but you need to maintain consistency across the entire training experience. Off-the-shelf learning content is a convenient solution, but it probably won’t speak in your organization’s voice. When you’re adding content to your Learning Management System, make sure you do everything you can to tailor it for your business and the people within it. Deal with eLearning companies who can build the content with your brand in mind, or better still, invest in an authoring tool that lets your training department create their own content.
3. Use Your Brand To Tell Your Story
As I’ve mentioned, the brand should distil everything your company represents. Since the marketing department has worked so hard to boil down the essence of your business, it seems silly not to make the most use of their efforts. To use Growth Engineering as an example, our brand is all about releasing the hidden superheroes within every employee. We use the same narrative when we train our own employees. Learners in Growth Engineering don’t simply complete training content. Every eLearning unit and assessment on the system is a chance to unlock a new superpower and step ever closer to superhuman status. In this way, everyone in Growth Engineering is trained to live the values behind the brand.
4. Make Space For Personal Brands
Creating a branded platform is just the start. It gives you a good foundation to communicate the company’s message and ethos. However, some of your best training resources come from the people within the organization. Your learners will only share their knowledge if they feel they have ownership over their training. The Learning Management System users should be able to customize their profiles and put their own stamp on the platform. Letting them change their profile photo is a good start, but personalization in learning platforms has come a lot further in the last few years. It’s possible to give your learners a portfolio showcasing the work they’re most proud of. The sense of freedom they get from these flexible options improves engagement and helps the training go a lot further.
Final Words
Having an engaged workforce is essential for business success. As learning technology evolves, its role in employee engagement becomes stronger. When employees feel like their company cares about their development, they’ll go the extra mile to provide exceptional service. This is something that the customers will take note of and it will improve their perception of the company. Ultimately, when you use your brand to enhance your training, the training will eventually enhance your brand. That’s exactly what you need to increase your customer base, boost profits and get that all-important return on your training spend.
