Is Your Staff Too Busy For Training? How To Train Busy Employees
With proper planning and the right approach, training busy employees is one of the easiest objections to overcome.
If your Human Resources department has been asked to implement a training program in an environment characterized by busy employees, start by looking at routine aspects of their day that could be improvised or even dropped as non-essential.
For example, it may be part of the routine to have a 15-minute gathering three times a week to ensure everyone is clear on the corporate priorities. Could that goal be met with two meetings and the third 15-minute time-slot, already booked on employee agendas, be used to launch the training initiative?
When employees are busier than normal, avoid any approach to training that demands their presence for full days or even half days, and certainly avoid weekends. Instead, you can use 10-minute learning segments and achieve more effective results.
Tap into eLearning software to allow employees to have flexibility in learning. The sales manager may have 10 minutes waiting for a client who is late. The production manager may want to tackle the project while having her morning coffee while her house is still quiet. The customer service manager may be willing to dedicate half an hour on Saturday morning to learning from the comfort of their deck chair at the cottage.
Keep the short and effective approach to the development of the learning materials as well. No video should exceed 10 minutes, and six is better, according to research conducted by Philip Guo at the University of Rocherster. No lesson should take longer than 10 minutes to complete, and five minutes is better.
When you deliver training in short segments, challenge your employees to illustrate how they are incorporating their training into their work each week. How are they using what they are learning?
There is no topic, no matter how complicated, that can't be broken down into bite-sized pieces. Take advantage of small pockets of time that surface in even the busiest work days and make it easy for employees to fill them with learning.
Many companies pride themselves that all their busy executives engage in at least two half days of training a year to keep on top of new developments in their industry. You can accomplish the same thing more effectively for your busy staff if you ask them merely to give you 10 minutes a week to learning something new. Not only that, there is a better change that they will use what they learn in these short segments of training.
As well, because learning will be seen as a continual process, you will contribute to building a vibrant culture of learning.
Bite-sized learning is starting to become more widely adopted by corporate HR and trainers. With the majority of the modern workforce being pressed for time, it makes sense why learners don't want to spend hours in a room taking training. Another factor influencing the growth of bite-sized learning is the demand for mobile learning or flexibility in learning. If trainers or organizations want to have an effective training session on mobile, then they need to make sure the learning course is short and concise. Having a mobile learning course for workers with busy schedules is a perfect solution because people can often access tehse learning courses using their mobile phones while travelling and on their own schedule.
The most important thing to remember when it comes to training your employees is to find a training method that works best for your employees. Having a training method that is flexible and agile and allows room for change is a great start. In order to save cost and money, spend time finding the right training method for your organization and communicate with your employees regarding if this is the right choice.
If your goal is to improve your employees skill set, then your employees are the one that should be on board with your method of training. It will ultimately be very counterproductive if your organization spends so much time and effort to train your busy employees and for them to not care or pay attention.
More and more organizations are starting to put serious value in employee training so they offer their employees incentives in order to take their training more seriously. Be it, gift cards, monetary incentives, or even a day off in order to get their employees more excited about their training.
