Even at Home, Training Keeps Your Employees Engaged and Productive

In today’s business environment, employee engagement drives productivity. In turn, productivity affects the cultural and financial health of an organization. In a 2018 employee engagement survey conducted by the Brandon-Hall Group, 62 percent of respondents from highly productive companies said that improving worker productivity was their main reason for implementing employee engagement strategies, programs and activities.

In a separate 2015 study, seven out of ten respondents said that job-related training and development opportunities directly influence in their decision to stay with a company. For millennials and Gen Z workers, it’s nearly 90 percent. The lesson here is to invest in retaining your present employees.

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The biggest key in keeping employees engaged and productive is to incorporate efficient, applicable and effective training into their work schedules. Unfortunately, many companies don’t have the time, money or resources available to create sustainable training programs that are:

• Aligned with organizational goals and strategies.
• Agile enough to adapt in real time with a learner who is struggling to comprehend the material.
• Flexible enough to maximize each learner’s optimal learning style. 
• Cost-effective enough to show a return on investment and gain leadership buy-in. 
• Relevant enough to keep learners engaged. 
• Reinforced well enough so learners retain knowledge long after the initial training ends. 

What ends up happening is that the company’s learning and development personnel and management team piece together the most essential training for employees, which is often compliance training, familiarization of equipment or software, or safety training for hazardous environments. While this training is relevant and important, employees will begin to see it as a chore if it is the only training provided.

Compliance or safety training does not put employees on an upwards career track or develop them personally. Once that happens, employees disengage from training, and productivity slips. In a worst-case scenario, employees feel like the company doesn’t care or consider them an important part of the team.

Today, there is an almost insatiable appetite for learning and development that goes far beyond millennials and Gen Z workers. Baby boomers and Gen X are discovering that new methods of delivering training are keeping them engaged, and their skills become as competitive as everyone else in the workforce. Your ability to engage your workforce and optimize their productivity can help attract — and keep — the top talent in your industry.

Download the white paper and learn more about how employee training has an effect on engagement, productivity and organizational health.