Why do employees stay away from eLearning?
Studies show that on average, only about 10 percent of participant actually complete online courses. Although the number for corporate eLearning courses may better this average, it is still low.
There are a number of reasons why individuals—particularly employees—do not fully participate in eLearning courses. These could be traced to factors associated with the employees or the courses.
Employees may complain they don’t have enough time or simply aren’t persuaded that the exercise is worth their while. More often than not, the problem stems from the courses themselves; they could be boring, irrelevant, or lacking helpful supporting materials and peer interaction.
Either way, the reason employees do not engage and complete these online courses can be summarized as a lack of sufficient motivation to do so. Below, I proffer 8 tips to galvanize your learners and increase the overall employee motivation toward these courses.
Employee motivation – 8 tips to motivate your learner
1. Career progress
When employees cannot see a clear path of growth in their careers, they get discouraged and this dampens their attitude to work and other work-related activities like training.
To motivate staff to participate in and complete corporate training, one should relate the training to advancement in their respective careers.
If employees understand that the training they are getting will improve them and directly contribute to their promotion, they are more likely to go into those sessions with zest and get the best out of the program.
2. Provide supporting information at fingertips
Clarity is one of the biggest motivators for any assignment. With this in mind, design your eLearning to provide technical support as well as moral support for the participants throughout every module.
The idea is to ensure the learner knows exactly what to do at every point in the course. It is good practice to provide an online support system where learners connect with L&D reps to solve issues that may arise during the training.
Always add support contacts—email and phone number—in areas where the learner can easily find them.
3. Make eLearning easily accessible
Digital applications are becoming mobile-friendly, your eLearning course should too. Since a lot of employees engage in these pieces of training outside of work hours, and often from their phones or other mobile devices, it makes sense to provide them in formats that can be easily accessed on the go.
4. Employee motivation through social learning
The first step is to make the eLearning course as interactive as possible. When designing your course, create a platform that allows participants to interact amongst themselves and also share their experiences and achievements with other staff.
Such a system will garner comments, ideas, and other user-generated content (USG) which are very helpful in the learning process. By using eLearning automation tools like Wizcabin, one can integrate content generated by employees to fill the gaps often left out in regular corporate training modules.
5. Use multimedia effectively
A picture, they say tells a thousand words but more than that, including multimedia content to e-courses, can greatly increase engagement. These include videos, graphs, infographics, and audio content.
A great introductory video that can be shared in staff groups will go a long way to motivate employees to commit to eLearning objectives.
6. Gamification- employee motivation through game-like courses
Gamification—the application of typical elements of game playing to non-game context—encourages participation, engagement, and loyalty. This effectively turns boring and difficult tasks into an enjoyable activity with great learning outcome.
A study by Entertainment Software Association found that 70 Percent of Major Employers including American Express, JP Morgan, and Pfizer use game-like simulations in staff training.
7. Reward employees that complete courses
Employee motivation is greatly helped by rewards at the end of eLearning programs because nothing succeeds like success. It is good practice to reward eLearning participants for completing a course.
These rewards for employee motivation could be in the form of certificates and promotions.
8. Make eLearning as flexible as possible for employees
Finally, make sure your course modules are broken down into manageable bits which your employees can take one bit at a time. Make provisions for the learners to start, pause and continue training at anytime and anywhere they are. It is important that the process is flexible as it is pleasant.
When implemented, these strategies will definitely increase your employee motivation towards participating in and completing eLearning courses.
Not only will this improve your employee productivity, but it will also save the company lots of money wasted on underutilized eLearning programs.
