Creating organizational training plans can be overwhelming, so it is important that you start with the basics first.
Planning Organizational training can be very much tricky to work out, and anyone in a leadership position can confirm this.
When the time comes to teach employees, a team, or your entire company something new and/or something complicated, you can’t help but sigh, knowing full well what a strategic nightmare it is going to be to accurately plan and accomplish.
The question now is how can you make the planning for any Training much easier?
Now, let’s look at 5 key factors to consider when working these training plans out.
1. Know your Learning Group Size:
A common mistake made in a learning environment, including organizational learning within companies, is trying to teach groups that are too large.
When a group is too large, such people will need extra attention within the group; especially when they have legitimate questions to ask or something they do not understand.
Also, when a group is large, it can drag things unnecessarily long.
Which reduces reception of the whole training program and even causes the cultivation of some discontent among employees when individuals slow the process down.
It is better to create small learning groups, that can be seen as divide and conquer.
2. Think About Time Constraints:
Time constraints in your learning plans are mistaken or incorporated into work hours, especially during the design phase.
This results in changing of plans & schedules such as holding meetings or lectures after hours or on weekends.
People that work salary jobs are the first to point out how terrible this is, and how welcoming they can be to the information being shared.
Whether or not they should give up all or part of their weekend to be present for the training.
Such things will cultivate a resentfulness in many of your employees that will make the whole process useless.
It can also breed discontent on a level that, if done occasionally, endangers the overall quality of performance and stability within the work environment, and it can cripple the belief they have in your leadership.
You can consider prioritizing when they perform their most tasks and find out which part of the day is least demanding. Then schedule your learning program in little parts during these times.
By doing this over time, less important work will be recovered, and your employees will be receptive to learning if the dull, menial work is changed. They will come to enjoy it.
Don’t disturb their breaks or lunch hours though, as this develops the same lack of reception and discontent as invading their weekend’s plan, whether on a sort of lower level.
3. Engagement:
The traditional classroom method of learning doesn’t really work that well anywhere and anyhow, with different people forming a group.
In addition to the points above, the continuous form of teaching it creates is inefficient and most times too dull to retain the attention of the employees involved.
It is much better to find ways to make your learning program engaging through different methods like gamification, or by spending some one-on-one time with people, so they can learn as they do.
Hands-on learning or through unconventional methods are more likely to produce positive results and guarantee reception on all levels.
4. Incentives:
Whenever processes and systems need to be revised, or new information needs to be learned, it is best you reinforce a learning program and make incentives available as well.
This goes along with gamification philosophies that you can develop for your organization.
When individuals learn something new and challenging, they enjoy some sense of acknowledgment for their accomplishment and will expect their skill as an employee to be viewed as valuable eventually.
Acknowledging and rewarding your employee’s extra effort and accomplishments above and beyond their normal duties can improve their productivity and drive for them to continue to learn and evolve as employees, a team, and for the company.
5. Specialization:
On this aspect of smaller groups, it is best that you assign learning groups by what they are learning in relation to their jobs.
Avoid generalized learning of the entire office; if some aspects of the learning are relevant ONLY to individuals, teams, or departments.
As a leader, you know what your employees and teams specialize in, and so you know what they need or do not need to learn from new topics or subject matters.
You can use this knowledge, because employees subjected to unnecessary knowledge that they do not need, become frustrated and miss out on the parts that they really need to know.
This is something that most leaders don’t consider when making organizational training plans and it is often a source of failure.
Additionally, utilizing specialization during the learning program increases efficiency when people learn only the relevant information.
Thus, relieving some of the problems faced with work hours (as mentioned above), requiring fewer workarounds that affect productivity or personal time.
These are some factors you should consider when planning out organizational training, and hopefully, they can provide insights into how you can truly reach your employees and ensure that learning is an interesting and productive experience for everyone.
Please, we would like to hear your thoughts on this in the comments section and let us know if you have any other key factors to add.
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