The tell-tale rolling of eyes every time the next training session is announced. The carefully polite but disinterested smiles during the class. Are you having sleepless nights thinking that your training program is receiving a less than enthusiastic response from your team? If so you are not alone.
Many employees quickly lose interest in their assigned training program. For example, a study conducted by the City & Guilds Group in the UK found that over two-thirds of workers (69%) are bored with the training on offer.
From outdated teaching strategies to monotonous training content, many factors can cause a training program to be less than appealing to employees. Before delving into them it’s necessary to identify the red flags that indicate your training program is losing favor among your workforce.
Lack of impact
One of the biggest signs that a training course is ineffective is the lack of any tangible results. For example, has the customer ratings improved since your employees completed their training? If customer ratings continue on a downward graph, it’s time to investigate whether the employees in charge of customer service or product development have done a shoddy job. Which begs the question: Just how engaged they were during the training, to begin with?
Decrease in Workplace Innovation
Is your product development team stuck at the same place where they were before the product development course? Are they still struggling to come up with innovations? Maybe they haven’t been able to take back anything worthwhile from the training.
Loss of morale
Ideally, your employees should be more confident after they complete training. If they still show no progress at work and display low morale – due to feeling unequipped or inadequate at handling tasks then it indicates they haven’t been engaged in the training process.
Frequent Absenteeism
Employees are human beings. Some may not be able to attend a session due to a personal emergency. However, if this becomes a pattern rather than a one-time event then the question arises if they are trying to avoid training at all costs.
Rumors Have It
Your employees will very likely not reveal to you that they found that workshop as dull as ditchwater. However, they will certainly discuss it among themselves. If you get to hear from the in-house rumor mills that the new Sales Training course did not impress the sales team, take it seriously.
What Makes a Training Program Boring To Employees?
Irrelevant Content
Let’s face it training courses are extra demands on your employee’s time. Workers often have to juggle office duties and attend classes. At times they may even have to train during off-days. If the employee feels that what they are being taught is not related or relevant to their job role or career trajectory, they will lose enthusiasm.
Excessively Academic Courses
Training programs should always be focused on two things – business goals and employee needs. If training content is too text-heavy, dry, or ‘academic’ it would bore your employees in no time. While designing training content care should always be taken to make it more interactive and easily comprehensible.
A-One Size Fits All Training Approach
Not everybody learns the same way. There are aural learners, visual learners, verbal learners, physical learners, social learners, and solitary learners. Having a flexible/versatile training style that accommodates various learning styles is a hallmark of a great training program. If your trainer caters to only one type of learner and others feel side-lined this may be a red flag.
The course is mostly made up of long-winded lectures
Remember Professor Binn’s ‘A History of Magic’ classes? Except for Hermione Granger, all of the students dozed off during the class. The ghostly professor’s endless and repetitive lectures often put the class to sleep.
If training sessions mostly consist of never-ending lectures, many of your employees will zone out very quickly. Most people don’t respond to passive learning.
Does not provide self-paced learning
Employees are adults. Most researchers have shown that adults don’t respond positively to traditional instructor-centric teaching. If they are not convinced that the modules are immediately relevant to their project or don’t have much scope for self-paced learning, they quickly lose interest.
Parting Shots
A lot of time, money, and effort is spent to upskill the workforce. It can get frustrating if it seems as if some of your employees are not invested in the training.
But understanding the ‘why’ behind the lack of enthusiasm can be the first step in creating a training program that will win over your workforce and deliver results.