According to statistics, an average employee is productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes a day, which is only 31% of the 8-hour workday. Astonishing numbers, right?
Realizing that staff efficiency is the foundation of any business, company leaders are looking for ways to boost employee productivity and help the team work smarter. With so many people working from home and companies moving to a hybrid model, this becomes an even more pressing issue. Fortunately, with modern technologies, it can be addressed with online training or eLearning, and here’s how.
New Employee Onboarding
A new hire overcomes a long thorny path of integration in a company and, without a well-functioning onboarding process, it can take a new employee month to feel comfortable and become productive. By moving onboarding online, you can significantly speed up this process. You only need to create an onboarding course once and then assign it to all newcomers.
A common onboarding course includes a brief overview of the company — its history, mission and values, corporate culture, an overview of the products/services provided, as well as a clear description of the employee’s new role and expectations. Some organizations, especially working in strictly regulated industries like manufacturing, finance, insurance, and transportation, also include compliance training in the onboarding program.
To create an onboarding course, you don’t need to be a tech geek. There are some authoring tools, iSpring Suite for example, that allow you to build courses easily from ready-made templates. Moreover, with iSpring, you can do this in the familiar PowerPoint interface, as the toolkit works as a PPT add-in.
After your online course is ready, you can upload it to your LMS and enroll new hires. Most progressive LMSs like iSpring Learn allow you to automate the enrollment process. You just need to set the rule once that sends all new hires to the “interns” group and assigns them to an onboarding course immediately. With an LMS, your employees will be able to take an onboarding course whenever and wherever it’s convenient for them. You just need to determine the dates when the program should be completed.
As you can see, online onboarding will not only help employees become productive faster but will also relieve managers and supervisors of a good part of mentoring tasks they would otherwise have to perform.
Regular Assessments
Remember your school days: if a teacher says there will be a test during the next class, you feel more motivated to prepare for the lesson properly. This modality is also relevant for adult training. When an employee knows that their knowledge and skills will be assessed and results will be examined by the management, they are more stimulated to learn. And the more skilled a person is, the more effective and productive they are at work.
Besides, regular assessments (semi-annual or at least annual) will help you define employees’ knowledge gaps and fill them promptly by providing additional training. They are also a great way to identify employees with high potential and see whether a person is ready for promotion.
An easy way to provide assessments is to create online quizzes. With iSpring Suite, you can make quizzes in a matter of minutes, as the toolkit comes with ready-made templates of 14 question types. To make quizzes even more effective, you can add slides containing detailed information on the subject, give detailed feedback, and create individual learning paths, depending on how well each employee is performing on the quiz.
Once you upload your quiz to an LMS and your employees will complete it, you’ll be able to generate reports with detailed statistics on each learner. For example, iSpring Learn will let you see scores, a number of attempts, a per-answer breakdown, and the time spent on the assessment.
Time Management Training
Time management training is focused on developing employees’ skills in prioritizing, organizing, and delegating so they have all the necessary techniques and practices to use time wisely and manage workload with as little stress as possible. This is a capacity that can empower a team to be more engaged, more fulfilled, and more productive.
One of the most sustainable approaches to time management training is to provide it via eLearning courses. Since the same management practices and tips are typically suitable for various roles and businesses, you might want to buy off-the-shelf courses (many are available on the market). However, employees usually respond much better to the content they feel is tailored to their company and position. So, it makes sense to create eLearning courses on your own.
To make content even more engaging, you can use storytelling and show scenarios that your employees often encounter at work. You can also add interactivity to your courses to make scenarios come alive when a person clicks on buttons and images.
Single Knowledge Base
A corporate knowledge base is like an online library — it stores all the company standards, manuals, regulations, and other important information accumulated over the years. For a knowledge base to be truly helpful for employees, it should be user-friendly. It’s crucial to organize the storage, search, and updating of information properly, and the easiest way to do this is with an LMS. Your employees will be able to log in at any time, find the necessary materials, and refresh their knowledge.
For example, if a project manager doesn’t know how to assign a task to a subordinate, he will search for this information in the knowledge base. And if a newly hired sales professional doesn’t know how to use a CRM, he can find instructions in the LMS.
It’s also convenient to store all the answers to frequently asked questions about the company products and services in a single hub, so employees can always find the information they need on their own, without distracting colleagues. All this will help a team to be more productive and let all the members work according to the same standards.
Personalized Training Programs
Personalized learning is an effective way to boost employee productivity because customization makes the eLearning content relevant to each individual. Adapting the training program according to each employee’s needs, interests, and proficiency level helps them gain the skills they really need and do so quickly.
Of course, you might think that it will require a lot of resources to create individual learning programs, but you might find it efficient to use this method for upskilling your managers and other company leaders.
Let’s say you decided to create a leadership training program for your head of sales. With an LMS, instead of assigning a range of standalone courses that are difficult to manage or building a ridiculously long course, you can create a learning track. The learning track will let you combine multiple courses into a long-term program.
Conclusion
Giving employees an opportunity to learn online is not just a vital training decision, but also an important business decision. When compared to conventional training, it can significantly boost employee productivity by providing more flexibility, mobility, and measurability.
