Employee Training and Development

What is Engaging Employee Training and Development?

There are some common problems in companies’ existing training programs. One of the biggest problems is a lack of strategic focus to their training. Companies don’t train employees in the skills most critical to the business’s stage of development. They send the wrong people to the training, over-train them and spend too little time on implementation.

Many programs fall short of being both engaging and useful—qualities that should be mandatory. Engaging training enriches lives, energizes, and ideally creates more loyal employees. Useful training offers a practical skill critical to this stage of organizational development.

So how do you fix these problems?  It takes a reality check.

Plan first, train later. For training to have real value, your company must first have a clear strategy and execution plan in place. Your training strategy should clearly articulate three to five core skills and competencies and three to five key activities that will make execution possible. Your training should then focus on these skills and competencies. The people who attend the training should be responsible for acting on it. If they won’t be the one on the front lines using it, they shouldn’t be there. They won’t be sufficiently invested in absorbing what's being taught.

Train in sprints, not a marathon. Programs should be a series of sprints: train, implement, train, implement, until what is learned becomes a habit.  As Peter Brown explained in his book Make It Stick, small doses of learning should be followed by a series of quizzes based on open-ended questions so the brain is allowed to develop associated circuits and also explore “neighboring territories” that spark creativity.

Road test your training. During the implementation and repetition phase, give employees access to tools they can use to practice what they’ve learned. Tools are the bridge between theory and actual knowledge. Once the learned material becomes a habit, someone is ready to move onto the next piece of training.

Spend less, not more. Successful training doesn’t require millions of dollars. You do, however, need to commit time to implementation, repetition and assessment of what you’ve learned for several months after the initial training session—or your training won’t work.

A flexible employee training platform, like Litmos, allows managers to identify the training needs of their employees, assign the training accordingly, and track all completions in one location. Litmos can make employee engagement easy, fast, and accessible anywhere. Check out our 14-day free trial today![:in]

Performance Evaluation Reviews

Employee evaluation comments are extremely valuable for individuals who are liable for evaluating employees that work under them. Constructing powerful performance phrases can be a bit challenging for some people. In this article, I will provide you with some employee evaluation comments that you will be able to use next time you need to administer a review.

Employee evaluation comments are a critical part in today's professional settings. The Human Resources department along with the employee's manager are usually the responsible parties of an employee's performance on an annual basis. Every company has a different systematic approach to the way they handle performance evaluation reviews and comments in order to evaluate their employees strengths and weaknesses. Many times, the HR department has the employee fill out a self-evaluation form, that usually allows the manager to see what their employee thinks about himself or herself. Below are several employee evaluation comments you can choose from to use in your evaluation:

• Time Management and Punctuality
• Stress Management
• Communication Skills
• Professionalism
• Leadership and Team Building

The more you know from your employees, the lower your risk of employee turnover, compliance fines, and costly re-hiring expenses. Every year companies pay out millions in legal fees for HR-related claims. Educating employees on expected standards and professional conduct is the first step in ensuring that your company and its staff don’t become another statistic.