Employee engagement: How learning can help

Company culture and wellness perks all play a key role in employee engagement. But there’s a key factor that’s often overlooked: learning. According to LinkedIn research, 94% of employees said that they would stay at a company if it invested in their learning and development. So, how do other companies do it? To foster a learning culture, there are a few best practices that can help.

Provide on-demand learning opportunities

On-demand learning is growing in popularity with 42% of millennials saying that they would like learning opportunities accessible in the flow of work. By offering, quality micro-learning content, employees can choose to learn at a time that best meets their needs. Learning content is far more relevant and useful when it’s acquired at the point-of-need. By supporting employees in the workflow, you provide much more value by addressing performance and knowledge gaps. On demand training increases employee engagement significantly, as they can learn at a pace that suits them, easily connect with SMEs and access learning materials any time and place.

Boston based company NextWorth opted for microlearning as the solution to train their target employees. They delivered video-based microlearning courses to employees, which could be accessed right on the shop floor. Quick, simple quizzes helped them understand how to tackle various challenging trade-in scenarios. Within two weeks, inconsistencies in retail partner locations were cut by half, achieving double-digit improvement in trade-in accuracy.

Make learning social and interactive

Learners are more mobile and social than ever. More and more organisations are turning to social learning to deliver engaging eLearning experiences to their employees. Over half of all learners value more social, collaborative environments – both in the office and when they are engaged with online learning. Deploying social learning concepts and technologies as a part of the learning mix is no longer an option, it’s a necessity.
Need Proof?

• Social learning approaches have a 75:1 ROI ratio compared to formal web-based training.
• 82% of businesses that use social learning tools want to increase their use in the future.
• Course completion increased to 85% on HBX, a Harvard Business School online education initiative when it introduced social learning.

You can incorporate social learning into your learning strategy by:

• Allowing learners to share progress on social networks.
• Hosting live events to encourage real-time interaction.
• Starting online discussion forums in your LMS.

Help learners build their soft skills

You’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it again: soft skills matter. Developing a culture of learning isn’t just about helping your employees build hard skills, it’s also about focusing on skills that everyone needs, regardless of industry or job. With the rise of AI and the looming skills gap, soft skills are becoming increasingly important. These are precisely the type of skills that robots cannot automate. This also goes on to explain the findings of a recent survey which found that 57% of senior leaders put soft skills over hard skills when it comes to what they need their employees to develop.

One way that you can utilise eLearning for soft skills development is by incorporating microlearning. You can create video clips to present learners with scenarios that require soft skills to navigate. In order to measure the effectiveness of the courses you would need to make them measurable. To achieve this, you can identify KPI’s that need perfection. These may include increase in satisfaction of employees, increase in sales of a specific product or reduction in safety incidents. Keeping a track of these KPI’s allows you to see the soft skills that employees are applying on the job. By making learning a valuable use of your learners time, you’ll have happier employees who feel valued.

I hope this blog has given you some food for thought on how to foster a learning culture in your company and truly increase employee engagement.