The past year has brought no shortage of changes to the corporate training environment. And one of the biggest challenges that top L & D pros face is how to create a proactive learning culture and become a learning organization.
According to the work and research of Peter Senge, a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. There are many examples of these learning organizations including General Electric, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Google, Johnson & Johnson, and Apple.
To stay ahead of competitors, companies must constantly enhance the way they do business. Unfortunately, more performance-improvement programs fail than succeed. That's because of many factors, but a key one is engagement.
At MaxIT, we’ve been studying engagement across our millions of learners and we’ve uncovered some startling information.
Many of the off-the-shelf training products we’ve seen have an average engagement of only 5% for non-required training. That’s low, but what does it mean?
You’re paying for training that no one is taking.
Let’s say that your off-the-shelf training costs $50 per user. If you have a 5% engagement, your actual cost is really $1,000 per user. And it gets worse. There are actually three metrics: Cost per user, engagement, and impact.
Let’s say you have a training program that will teach your employees how to increase productivity by an hour a week. If you have 1,000 people eligible to take the training, but only have a 5% engagement, that training will have an impact on your company. Just not a very big one. Over the course of a year, the organization will see a 2,600-hour increase in productivity. But what if we could show you how to get an 80% engagement? That would result in a 41,600-hour increase in productivity as shown in the graph below.
And, instead of spending $1,000 per user, you’re actual cost per user would only be $63.
Now, add in training communication, leadership skills, customer service, and other soft skills and the positive impact you’ll see in your company will be impressive. If you have engagement.
Not only do you get lower costs and better performance, but there are also a host of benefits. For instance, according to a Gallop poll, when employees believe they have opportunities at work to learn and grow, absenteeism drops by up to 44%. Not only do you get even more production, you have happier, more motivated, and more engaged employees.
Unfortunately, just having courses available, doesn’t mean you’ll get engagement. Courses that get engagement leverage science and research and consider a host of factors such as duration, colors, eye movement, and more.
If your courses are created with these in mind — even if the actual training material is good — chances are, you’re not getting the engagement you want.
We want what’s best for you. That’s why we’ve partnered with the best course developers to offer both short-form and long-form training.
Short-form training is great for getting people up to speed (think onboarding) on certain competencies, specifically a variety of soft skills. They're also great for getting people familiar with a specific skill set as well as brushing up on particular skills such as communication, sales, and customer service.
Long-form training offers deeply immersive courses that can qualify for continuing education credits and are linked to universities such as MIT and Harvard as well as publications like Fast Company and Inc. magazine.
For more information about how we can help your organization, just give us 30 minutes and we’ll show you how we’ve improved engagement for our clients and created much better impacts in their organization. Click here to schedule a call.
