Creating effective training videos and content is crucial for ensuring strong employee adoption and engagement. In this article, we will explore best practices for crafting engaging and impactful training materials.
Let's dive into the strategies to make your training content impactful and drive successful adoption:
- Customize learning paths to align them with the organizational core competencies or core values
- Identify & share learning objectives to set expectations correctly and identify who has interests where
- Create snackable sizes of learning steps (not too much content at once)
- Include quizzes/tasks to reflect on learnings
- Incorporate different formats such as videos, links, PDFs, etc.
- Make sure the content is tailored to your audience
To encourage employees to complete learning paths within a certain timeline, consider the following:
- Communication is key! Send out about three announcement emails while launching a new learning path and regularly track the employees' progress so you can personally contact them to offer any assistance or clarification throughout the module rollout. This not only increases the participation rate but also allows the employees to have a general overview and clear understanding of the course content they will be learning in the live training session. Communicating deadlines, specifically, is key to building up urgency. What some of our customers do is that their leaders share who has completed the course, e.g., in a town hall meeting or async via Teams or Slack in one of their general channels. This simple act guides social behavior and motivates employees to conform and complete the module similarly to their peers.
- Have monthly optional Q&A learning webinars for the employees. They can be about 30 minutes long and will serve as a great opportunity to communicate any new courses assigned on any of our learning platforms. They are also a great opportunity to discuss common questions and address any of their concerns. This is also a good time to visually demonstrate how to upload certifications, where, etc. These webinars are useful in encouraging the less engaged employees to ask questions once they see their peers voice similar concerns.
- Consider providing further access to managers via admin settings so they can see the level of participation and discuss it with their direct reports in their 1:1s.
- Focus on application of learnings after the training: encourage the learner to reflect after each learning element in terms of (a) what they’ve learned and (b) how they will apply their learnings post training completion. This could be via a journal question within the learning path.
Have a mix of optional / compulsory steps, so that all learners get the essence of the training and complete all necessary steps but, if interested in deepening their knowledge, there are more elements available. - Not part of the training itself but follow up with the learner post training to understand how they applied their learnings / assess the impact of the learning path/initiative. You could also suggest a ‘buddy’ approach or assign users to a ‘learning set/cohort’, where they make commitments in terms of how they’ll apply their learnings and support one another to do so, etc.