29 January 2018
7
How satisfied are you and your employees with your corporate training materials?
We’ve probably all been there before. You start a new job at a company that you’re super excited to work for, and you’re all set to get your bearings, and get started in your new career.
At your onboarding session everything is going incredibly well, and then the HR director drops a fat binder full of written training materials on your desk and asks you to read through all of it and get back to them when you’re finished.
This is a scenario that plays out over and over again in many corporate workplaces. Despite advances in e-learning technology and digital training platforms, many businesses use written training materials, which are hardly the future of education.
Written training materials do have a place in corporate training. Brief, easy-to-understand handbooks and manuals are effective at employee engagement and for developing employees’ skills. But it’s easy for companies to rely too much on written materials. And doing so can have a negative effect on your business.
Here are six reasons that your written training materials are not working.
1. Your training content is too long
If you give an employee, a ten-page document that outlines their basic job duties, expectations, and other information, they’re likely to read and comprehend the whole thing. It’s straightforward and simple.
But if you drop a huge number of written documents on them at once and ask them to review them, it’s easy for them to get lost and not understand what they’re supposed to do. And once they start with their day-to-day job duties, they’re likely to ignore this documentation altogether and never look at it again.
2. Your corporate training material is poorly written
Most corporate training materials can benefit from a rewrite or an edit. You want all of your training materials to be brief, straightforward, and have a clear purpose.
Unclear or scattered written training materials are going to be hard for your workers to get through, and nearly impossible to understand.
3. There is no interactivity
Sitting at a table reading through a corporate ethical responsibility handbook is not engaging. It’s a passive, relatively uninteresting task.
That’s why e-learning is so powerful. Online learning forces employees to actively engage with information, business scenarios, and human resource management policies, among other things. With regular quizzes and questionnaires, employees must actively engage with coursework in order to continue.
Interactive training helps employees retain knowledge more effectively, and can lead to increased employee engagement.
4. You’re unable to measure results
This is one of the biggest issues with a standard written corporate training handbook. Unless you’re planning on administering a written test—which is quite rare—you’re not really going to have any way to measure how well your employees understood your written documentation.
E-learning, in contrast, integrate written quizzes, tests, and scenarios throughout the entire process. This helps reinforce what employees have learned, and helps them quantify their progress, and understand how well they’re doing.
5. There’s no value in your current corporate training manual
If an employee does not have the value of a course explained to them, they are not going to engage with the course content.
Everyone needs a purpose, and if your workers feel like your written training content is purposeless, they’re likely to ignore it and carry on with other tasks.
6. Workers neglect training
This is another huge problem with corporate training that does not use interactive tools like eLearning platforms. Once your human resources management personnel have onboarded a new worker, they’re likely to dive head-first into their new responsibilities.
That means that the binders full of corporate training content you gave them are likely to be stuffed into a desk drawer and ignored as soon as other job duties become more important.
E-learning platforms such as Schoox can help your employees stay on course with their interactive training material. Because e-learning is flexible and can be accessed anywhere at any time, workers can complete training courses when it’s convenient for them and they are not busy with other job responsibilities.
Understand where written corporate training materials can succeed—and fail!
A brief, well-written, and clearly written training manual is absolutely effective at educating employees. But too often, written courses get bogged down with unnecessary information and become too lengthy, hard-to-understand, and relatively purposeless.
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