7 Ways to Encourage Employees to Prioritise Training

Encouraging and motivating employees to complete and engage with training has always been a challenge. Without properly addressing this challenge, you end up with low completion rates, missed targets, and low return on investment for your training activities.

How do you encourage employees to prioritise training in modern UAE and Saudi Arabian workplaces? How do you create a culture and environment where your team is motivated and enthusiastic about training?

Ensure Training is a Company Priority

You need to assess your company’s approach to training before you do anything in relation to training materials or the employees themselves. Is training a high-level priority for the company? Is the company investing sufficiently in training and producing the right training materials? Are there structures and policies in place that enable employees to find time to complete training, and do managers have the right mindset to make these policies work in practice?

These are all important questions as it will be difficult to encourage employees to prioritise training if training is not a priority for the company.

Communicate the Company’s Objectives and How Training Fits In

There are many reasons that cause employees to become disengaged with training. One of those reasons is that they don’t understand the importance or benefit of the training. They might not also understand how the content or topic area relates to their day-to-day reality, and they may not be fully aware of the bigger picture.

The simple solution to this is to communicate effectively with employees to help them see the bigger picture. When employees understand the company’s objectives, it will be easier for them to see how training fits in.

Encourage Employees to Set their Own Goals

Empowering employees is an important part of boosting training activity in your organisation. However, this isn’t limited to providing employees with e-learning content and then letting them decide when and where to complete it. This is also about encouraging employees to think about their skills, strengths, weaknesses, and career objectives, and then to set their own goals.

This could be career goals or professional development goals, but, either way, training is likely to be an important feature. When employees set their own goals in relation to training, they will be more motivated to engage with your content.

Enable Personalised Development Paths

It is important that employees feel the training they are completing is relevant to them, i.e., that it is helping them achieve their goals. Achieving this can be difficult with a one-size-fits-all approach, where everybody in the company or department or team is asked to complete the same training courses.

Employees will participate more proactively with training and professional development when they are on a personalised path, as the training will be more relevant to them.

Make Training as Easy as Possible

Another crucial part of getting employees to prioritise training is to remove as many barriers to completing that training as possible. The staff in your company are likely to already face pressures on their time, plus they will have responsibilities and targets to achieve. Training will take them away from those responsibilities, so the process has to be as smooth as possible.

Using e-learning as the delivery method for your training courses is a good way to make it as easy as possible for your team to complete training, particularly if the courses works well on mobile devices.

Using a microlearning strategy with e-learning is even more effective, as it means employees don’t have to find large chunks of time in their diary to do the training. Instead, they can complete it in smaller, bite-sized stages.

Ensure Your Training Courses Are Engaging

You will not get far with any training strategy if your courses and content are uninteresting. Making training courses engaging is essential.

By making your training courses engaging, you will improve results. Training courses that are engaging are also a motivational tool, as employees will be more likely to engage with future courses if they have had positive, enjoyable experiences in the past.

Ask Employees What They Want to Learn

This final point is about getting employees involved in the training development process, where they have a say in the types of course topics that are made available. You can do this by asking for feedback and by getting employees involved in conversations about training direction and strategy.

Of course, just because employees ask for training on a particular topic doesn’t mean you have to provide it. You should always connect the training content that you create with a business need. However, there are significant benefits to including employees in this process.

Getting employees to give higher priority to training is one of those benefits, but your team could also have good suggestions that you haven’t thought of yet. Whatever way you look at it, this is a good process to go through.

Maintaining Positivity Towards Training

Encouraging employees to prioritise training is not a one-time event. Instead, it is an ongoing process that requires good leadership and a commitment across the board to continuously improve. Start with mindsets, and the rest will flow more easily.