But training programs often fail to convey the necessary information to the intended user. But why so? As they turn out to be less interactive, it becomes a daunting task for you to penetrate their minds. Thus, slowing their learning process which leads to loss of time.
On the contrary, if you compile interesting content for your training program, along with an engaging medium of delivery, audience would not feel forced to learn. Rather, they’ll enjoy their learning process till the end.
This scenario indicates that it’s time to step out of the conventional training system. Experiments are important to bring out some refreshing training ideas that help to impart knowledge to all your team members.
Training Ideas to Refresh Your Team
If you feel lost on “where to start” phase, then here are some of the many interesting approaches and methods that’ll help to provide training to your employees.
1. Cross-functional Training
Employees appointed to perform a particular function in a company, like sales or marketing or production, tend to remain in that functional area for the rest of their careers. Although, they get to interact with the upstream and/or downstream functions, they don’t get to know the work of other functional areas and the challenges faced by them.
This leads to a certain amount of hostility and lack of respect towards their team members from other functional areas. Also, one of the reasons why work gets hampered and so does a smooth team functioning.
It is a great idea to let them interact with each other. This helps each team understand the functional areas of other employees and learn the execution of complete business chain. This inculcates a feeling of mutual respect as well as aligns them with the overall vision of the company in a better way. A better way to increase productivity at workplace.
2. Peer-to-peer Training
Another great way to spice up your training programs is to let employees train each other. There are team members who have additional skill-set or attended a training program. They can prove to be beneficial for the organization and other employees by presenting their learnings to their peers through presentations or workshops. Employees would feel a greater degree of comfort in clearing their doubts from fellow colleague. In short, making the training system more efficient.
Best part, every employee can share what they are good at with the rest of their team, making it fun to learn as well as teach. Mix it up with cross-functional training and you have got the perfect recipe for a healthy team environment.
3. Excursion Activities
Despite the amount of effort you put in jazzing up your interiors, office spaces do get boring. Employees become tired of the same cubicles and cabins, and ultimately suffer from a lack of motivation that decreases their productivity.
So, trying to get them to know new stuff in the same (or similar) environment is not a brilliant idea. Take your employees out on an excursion for imparting valuable lessons through interesting team activities. There are a lot of facilitators out there to help you out in organizing such an event. Your employees would appreciate this effort, and you would be satisfied (and surprised) with how effective such outdoor learning programs can be.
4. Client Visits or Site Visits
This idea is on the lines of the previous one, but with a little less adventure. There are a lot of employees who never get to meet the clients that they are working for or the real world output that they have created. That’s why it’ll be better to take your team to meet clients or visit the site where their efforts can be seen.
For example, if you are in a construction or architectural planning business, you can take your team members to the actual site. Once they’ll look at their work and the fruits of their effort in real life will broaden their perspective and let them get a better clarity on how to improve better. If you are in the FMCG business, take them to a supermarket and explain them the dynamics of product placement. You get the idea, right?
5. Gamification
It can be considered the latest buzzword, but gamification is effective for sure. Gamification means that you make learning interesting for your employees by converting the whole learning process into a video game like premise.
eLearning software allows you to track and monitor the progress of your training programs for each employee. You can simply allocate some incentive once every level gets completed and maintain a leaderboard to motivate employees for their training sessions.
6. Quiz Contests
Another method to make learning process more interesting for your employees is to hold fun-filled event with gifts and incentives. Let’s say you want your employees to gain better usability knowledge on simple project management software. But how do you make this interesting?
Some employees might simply opt for a no obligation, free trial of the software. That’s a great way to know the features of the product better. But some try to avoid spending that much time on exploring the product.
This is where a study module will play a major role. All you need to do is pass on the module and organize a quiz contest where participants will be asked questions based on it. This works effectively for corporate policies, standard operating procedures, and others.
7. Job Shadowing
Shadows make look scary but not in case of imparting knowledge to new recruits. You can ask senior members of the team to take two to three trainees under them to help them know their job roles better. Their only job is to become a shadow of their senior and closely follow them the whole day and observe what they do.
This is one of the ways where trainees can learn the daily work nuances of a job that no classroom training can impart. Besides, it creates a strong bond among seniors and freshers.
8. Role Reversal
If you want to train junior team members to take up leadership roles, then try to go for role reversal. It will fit the bill perfectly. Switch the positions of seniors and juniors for a small period of time and let the juniors face some of the challenges and strategic decisions that seniors usually come across. It would prepare them with real life experience.
Conclusion
Employees are an important asset for any organization. That’s why, it is important that you plan on how to groom them to make them a profitable investment for the organization. But what stops you from training them? It’s simple, their lack of interest towards the traditional learning programs.
So, how do you resolve this dilemma? You need to realize at this point that traditional training methods to impart job role knowledge won’t work anymore. You need to find different training methods to groom your work force and make their contribution more profitable for all.
Methods like quiz contents, gamification, excursion activities, site visits, and others can make training periods more interesting for employees. Their productivity will also skyrocket and so will overall profits for the company. So try adopting innovative training ideas to refresh your team from time to time and you’ll notice the difference.
Author Bio: David is a technical writer, his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in Project management domain helps him offer latest and fresh perspective on improved efficiency in work flows across organizations. His informative works on similar lines can be reached out on ProProfs Project.
