Remote working and training are a new normal. Work from home or training from home is not new; it’s just that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a change that almost every industry has had to switch to WFH.
To establish connectivity, collaboration, and communication, organizations have begun using tools or software like a learning management system or LMS to set up an employee training system in place. Such systems prepare a ground where employees can be taught new skills and develop enduring capabilities to ace their job roles.
But training employees from home isn’t easy. It’s very difficult to keep them motivated and engaged all the time. The psychological stress of training from home negatively impacts employees’ efficiency and productivity.
In this article, we will tell you eight amazing tricks or hacks to keep your employees motivated while training from home.
- Cultivate a sense of belongingness-
Training from home is highly economical for both the organization and employees. But many employees have complained that they feel as if there is a hole in their lives. This is quite a normal feeling to occur when employees are physically apart and hardly get the chance to interact with colleagues face-to-face.
If you want to keep your employees motivated, then you need to cultivate a sense of belongingness among them. Why not set up a virtual office?
A virtual office can be built using an LMS. You can use LMS to create an online learning community where employees can have personal as well as professional conversations. It will enable them to interact and facilitate the free flow of ideas and information. It will keep them motivated and hence increase their productivity.
- Promote a growth mindset-
Employees, when stuck at home, can feel low and lethargic. But as a leader, you need to take adequate measures to promote a growth mindset and help employees break their shells.
There are two kinds of leaders, one who promotes a fixed mindset (for instance, constantly telling underperforming employees that they won’t grow or telling them that what they’ve done isn’t sufficient) and the other who promotes a growth mindset (for instance, telling employees they shouldn’t give up, and there is always a room for improvement).
If you’re the first kind of leader, then you and your organization can never grow. By blaming employees for their poor performance and refusal to coach them, you may end up losing key talent. However, if you’re the second kind of leader who empowers and encourages employees, you can help employees realize their self-worth.
As a business leader, you should foster a growth mindset that emphasizes potential over performance. A growth mindset leads to the following benefits:
- Help employees learn new skills
- Encourage creativity and experimentation
- Use failures as an opportunity to train employees in a more effective way
- Don’t see underperforming employees as a liability
- Promote the desire to improve and get better
- Create a visual scoreboard-
Don’t you think it’s important to visually display the progress and achievements of employees?
A visual scoreboard shows the journey of an employee. It’s the best way to keep your employees motivated. The following are the attributes of a visual scoreboard:
- A Visual Scoreboard can spell out the priorities and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each team.
- It uses analytics and graphics to convey weekly, monthly, or quarterly progress.
You can conduct weekly or monthly team meetings to discuss the scoreboard. Such meetings can help employees see what others are doing and how they’re performing as compared to them. This can give a strong push to employees to finish their eLearning courses on time.
- Provide flexibility and convenience-
Employees working from home have to manage both their job as well as household responsibilities. Especially for women who have toddlers playing around, working and nurturing kids is quite challenging.
Hence, you need to take care of your employees and provide them an opportunity to manage their training and development. Using a learning management system, you can offer personalized training to employees.
Personalized training means that employees will decide when, where, and how they want to learn. By offering flexibility to decide the day and time to learn, employees will better focus on their work. Imagine a situation where a woman employee needs to breastfeed her baby, and it’s also getting late for the training class; you cannot leave your employees in such a dilemma where they get stuck between work ethics and motherly responsibilities.
Using an LMS, you can unlock the microlearning and mobile learning features which offer great convenience to employees. Pre-recorded training videos can be watched at any time by the employee, say while feeding the baby or traveling.
- Recognize employee efforts and achievements-
Who doesn’t love to be appreciated for one’s achievements? Your employees always wait for that golden moment when you’ll appreciate their efforts and say “well done, keep it up!”.
Training from home means there is a higher possibility that employees will feel isolated, disconnected, and stuck in one place. Hence, it’s imperative to praise them for their good work and even the little efforts they put in.
Recognizing employees’ efforts and achievements makes them feel valued. It enables them to prioritize their training and work and pushes them to chase their goals.
There are a number of ways to praise employees, including dropping an appreciation letter in their mailbox, sending a meal box at their doorstep, and conducting a team meeting to inform others about the employee’s contribution.
- Provide continuous feedback-
Employees seek continuous feedback to improve their skillset and knowledge. You can provide real-time feedback to employees using an LMS like Docebo.
Providing employees with timely, honest, and genuine feedback motivates them to get more involved in the training. There are a number of ways to offer feedback. For instance, you can generate automated reports through an LMS which can be referred to any number of times and at any time. Holding one-on-one feedback sessions through video conferencing is another useful way to inform employees about their strengths and weaknesses.
Make sure you use the right words or phrases and the right tone when conveying feedback. Avoid using phrases like ‘you are the worst performer; you always disappoint us; everything is perfect’. Don’t sound harsh or sugarcoat everything. Also, avoid making comparisons among employees as it can elicit envy, shame, and resentment.
- Workplace competitions-
Workplace competition is the best way to keep your employees energized, engaged, and motivated. Friendly competitions can boost employees’ confidence.
Workplace competitions include:
- Who will complete an eLearning module before the stipulated deadline?
- Who will close the maximum number of sales deals?
- Who will bring more clients to the organization?
Online hackathons and educational games can keep employees engaged. You can enhance the competition by leveraging the gamification features of LMS. You can distribute virtual coins, and trophies and give flashcards to the winners. Display the name of the individual winner or winning team on the leaderboard.
- Inspirational quotes-
Inspirational quotes before or at the end of the online training class can give a short burst of motivation to your employees. Team leaders can share inspiring quotes, philosophical thoughts, and winning mantras on the community platform. Displaying inspirational quotes on the company’s eLearning platform is another way to encourage employees.
Conclusion
We understand how hard it is to keep employees motivated during this tough time. But using the above tricks, you can keep employees on track and constantly inspire and encourage them to achieve their goals.
