If we’re being honest, many employees have formed less-than-stellar associations with workplace training. Consider this: Is an invitation to an upcoming training session likely to elicit eye rolls, grumbling or even employee complaints? If so, your organization is certainly not alone. Many people, whether they’d admit it aloud or not, feel that trainings tend to be dry, boring, confusing or an all-around waste of time spent on something besides daily job duties.
But training is important nonetheless. Sometimes it’s a legal requirement. In other situations, it’s simply a way to develop employees’ skillsets and knowledge. Training also helps employees at all levels adjust to new company protocols, policies and processes.
However, this doesn’t mean companies should simply accept that its employees will always see training as a necessary evil. A better tactic is to breathe new life into each training session by revamping your approach. Here are five ideas for making work training more exciting so as to maximize the effectiveness.
Incorporate Varied Learning Styles
It’s generally accepted that each member of the population primarily falls into one of four learning types:
- Visual: Visual learners visualize ideas to absorb information, often preferring aids like charts and maps.
- Auditory: Auditory learners prefer listening to visualizing or reading, benefitting from hearing information aloud.
- Kinesthetic: Kinesthetic learners are “doers,” solving problems and digesting data via hands-on activities.
- Reading and writing: Reading and writing learners use the written word to internalize information, and often depend on taking notes.
Problems arise when training sessions only encompass one, or perhaps two, of the learning styles described above. For example, an audio-based lecture without any accompanying visual aids would alienate visual learners. Theoretical classroom learning without any practical demonstrations will put kinesthetic learners at a disadvantage. Watching a video may work well for visual and auditory learners while making it difficult for reading and writing learners to take quality notes.
Trainings become much more engaging when they include something for each learning style.
Make Training a Conversation
The traditional paradigm for training entailed instructors lecturing and participants observing. But this setup risks creating a passive, one-way flow of information. Turning trainings into an interactive conversation, on the other hand, tends to boost audience focus and make concepts stick.
Incorporating instructor-led training activities, in which attendees use mobile devices to participate in interactive exercises, turns any lecture into a conversation. Giving learners the power to ask questions, submit answers, vote in polls and create word clouds in real time can boost the energy level in the room, even helping to increase retention.
Gamify Your Training Sessions
Elevate a typical training session by turning it into a game or competition. Offering small rewards and prizes can go a long way in motivating people to stay engaged until the very end. Here are a few suggestions from Eventbrite:
- puzzles
- riddles
- crosswords
- memory games, and
- ordering tasks
You can also create a points-based system by giving short quizzes at the end of each section. Participants can play as teams or individuals, depending on the exact nature of the game.
Gamifying your training sessions creates stakes—motivating people get play an active role.
Break Out into Groups
Back in school, it was always an exciting day when the teacher switched up the room layout. The lesson here? Novelty contributes to excitement. Splitting a training class into breakout groups for discussion or hands-on exercises shakes up the natural order of things, helping people refocus and learn concepts in brand new ways from a new vantage point.
Making work training more exciting is about more than just employee enjoyment—although it certainly helps in this regard. It’s about maximizing retention, so every attendee extracts the maximum possible value from each session.
