Asking the Right Questions about Your Training Strategy

In both planning your employee training strategy and evaluating it after, sometimes asking the right questions represent the best guide you can have in creating the right strategy. Only by seeking to discover the real results of training and which are the areas which can be improved, a senior leader can take the business’s profitability to a higher level. One needs to ask himself questions such as: To what degree did the training have a positive impact on your workplace productivity?  Although the answer to this question might not be a highly precise one, the training strategy that you create needs to have measurable results, which translate into a positive performance increase in workplace productivity. Employee performance before and after the training has to be properly assessed. Learners have to be able to apply everything they learned during the courses, and if this is not possible, they should be constantly be helped by managers in acquiring these new skills and developing their abilities What specific skills, habits or attitudes have changed as a result of the training? The specific changes which took place in employees’ performance needs to be properly identified once the standard training courses have ended. Employees need to be carefully monitored not only during the short period, but most importantly during the long-term one, as this is the one where changes are most obviously. If certain skills or attitudes are not mastered well enough, then the manager has the role of reinforcing them through continuous training means. Does your manager actively support and reinforce the training received by employees? It’s very unlikely for employees to remember everything they been taught during a training course, and this is not even standard training’s main objective after all. During the normal courses, employees need to be taught the most important skills they are to use in their everyday work, and the rest should be left to them to discover throughout time. It was proven to be the best when employees are given information to digest in small chunks, rather than all at once. Does performance support technology actively engaged and reinforce the training employees received? Technology has an important role in enforcing the standard training received by employees. Due to the fact that it facilitates employees testing and leaves up to them to decide when its best to accumulate information, they become more likely to actually understand what standard procedures involve. For instance, with the aid of an online guidance system, such as WalkMe, learners can reach their goals in a much shorter time than they would only with standard training. As technology progresses day after day, companies need to adapt themselves in order to survive the fierce competition and keep their levels on top. But when does training work as a method of motivation?  Many of us can recognize (and especially trainers who conduct training sessions) the  divide that exists during training in whichsome employees are highly motivated while some are not. Some of those in the unmotivated category might feel as though they would rather not even be there. which might manifest itself in short attention spans and rapid forgetting of training materials soon after it ends.  There are those who fail to see the usefulness of the course until the very end. It happens, though such a situation doesn’t make anyone happy. Yet the unmotivated group can be helped.  Thus, we come to a conclusion on motivating employees through training, namely: those who are intrinsically motivated to always be better and grow, and those which will be motivated only by a comprehensive training strategy, which involves continous learning, use of gamification, online guidance systems, and performanc support technology.