3 Training Options to Keep Employees Engaged

Employee engagement is one of the pillars of a business’s success.

Engaged employees are happier both in the office and in their personal lives. That alone should provide enough value for you to pursue boosting employee engagement to the best of your abilities.

One of the ways to help your employees give their best is to provide them with plenty of training options. These options should aim not only to make them better at what they do, but also to spark their curiosity and widen their horizons. Well-chosen employee training can awaken interests in matters that may not be directly related to their job, but which they can still surely benefit from.

Here are three training options that will help your employees become even more engaged at work.

Directly related to career advancements

One of the top reasons to provide training is to help your employees become even better at what they do. This can be achieved by providing training that is job-specific and can directly result in a promotion.

Bear in mind that you need to set two distinct career ladders: one for managers, and one for expert workers. Not all employees who are very good at what they do will be or even want to be great managers. Sadly, many companies still enforce promotion and advancement through management-related positions only.

Of course, you can and should offer managerial training to employees who express interest in leadership, and those you consider the right candidates. However, you should also provide training in advanced fields of the work your company does to others.

Remember – you are not trying to reward only your top however many percent. If you want to boost engagement, you need to provide training for everyone. Establish different levels of knowledge and interest, and make your choice from there.

Not quite related to the work you do

Sometimes you need to branch out a bit to learn more about your own work. If you’re a copywriter, you could benefit from a creative writing course. If you’re a salesman, you could do with a course in marketing. And so on.

Learning from experts in any field is always rewarding. You can learn more about commitment, draw some much-needed inspiration, and gain a new perspective on your own work.

Masterclass.com has recently become very popular (mostly due to their excellent YouTube campaign and their selection of teachers), and your employees might benefit from a course as well. There’s plenty to choose from, so you’ll need to do a bit of research. Education Speaks breaks down all the main highlights of each course for you in their Masterclass reviews, so you will easily be able to tell if it’s something you want to look into more.

An expert on board

Don’t forget that you already have access to a bunch of experts yourself – the most senior and experienced people in your own offices.

Getting a senior member of staff to provide in-house training can be an incredible way to boost engagement, expand knowledge, and improve the camaraderie between your teams. There’s no better way to personalize a training program than based on your own experiences, so recruiting a member of your own team to do the lecturing is the only way to go.

Run a poll first to see from whom would people like to learn and what topics would interest them. Keep the voting anonymous, and once you collect the results, see where you can start with a monthly or bi-monthly lecture. Make sure that you are not adding too much to a select employee’s plate, so work with their given schedule to find the best time to work in a training session.

Final thoughts

Incorporating a training course in your company culture can be a bit of a challenge at first. Employees might see it as a waste of time or merely as something they have to participate in if they want to get ahead.

It’s vital that you encourage training, learning, and improvement as part of your company’s values, as opposed to just a means to an end.

Let your employees come up with their own training plans and have a clear say in what you will be training them in. After all, you may have one idea in mind, while all of them would like to learn something completely different.

Don’t let any initial resistance deter you – after all, every change comes across some initial pushback. But as long as you stick to it, your employees will soon realize all the benefits of training. And you will begin to see those engagement benefits we’ve been talking about.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.