Learning and Development: The Key Driver of Employee Engagement

As per LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report, around 35% of L&D professionals are seeking newer ways to increase learner engagement. An engaged workforce contributes heavily to the company’s growth owing to higher productivity, lower turnover, increased profitability, and customer ratings. It is no secret that employee engagement is a serious business. Organizations which leverage learning and development (L&D) to boost employee engagement are well positioned to provide crucial training opportunities to build a more capable workforce and nurture talent for the future.

So, how can you ensure L&D is at the core of employee engagement? We’ve compiled a list of the top four ways to drive employee engagement through L&D.

Introduce a learning culture right from the get-go:
Providing a meaningful start to your new employees can not only help them connect with the business but also make them effective faster. Motivating your new workforce through appropriate employee engagement initiatives can result in them contributing to company’s growth in a short span. You can employ blended learning strategies where the new hires are provided access to the learning management system (LMS) during the pre-boarding stage for them to get acquainted with the company values. Post onboarding, learning initiatives through webinars, virtual instructor-led training (VILT), and so on can be implemented. Intelligent and efficient onboarding programs can create a positive impact on the new hires and can instill a sense of belonging.

Prevent the ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution:
Your company comprises a varied portfolio of employees who have their own set of career goals and expectations pertaining to workplace learning. Your L&D strategy must take this into account. While some employees may respond well to theoretical, more structured ways of learning, others may prefer an interactive format. In order to drive maximum employee engagement, you can consider implementing a balanced method of training that will resonate with the diverse audience. One way of doing it is through offering personalized learning paths by building training programs using different formats such as simulation, e-learning, gamification, and so on. By employing such a technique, you provide the flexibility and opportunity to the learners to play to their own strengths and hone the necessary skills at their own pace.

Provide L&D experience for remote employees:
With remote work becoming the default modus operandi, employees are demanding increased levels of flexibility and work-life balance. Driving employee engagement in such scenarios can be tricky. For this, your L&D strategy needs to evolve from traditional methods and adopt newer and relevant ways of training remotely dispersed employees. Virtual learning, social learning, mobile learning, are some of the ways through which you can leverage real-time communication to keep your employee engaged. For example, with social learning through chats and video conferences, learners can communicate with each other during a virtual session that results into recreating a remote-work friendly learning environment.

Adopt technology:
Digital transformation has been causing all sorts of positive disruptions in the business ecosystem since a while now. L&D too needs to keep pace with this trend in order to stay relevant to a more tech-savvy workforce. Studies have shown that organizations with a robust learning culture are early adopters of learning technology. With the availability of a wide range of digital-savvy learning environments such as e-Learning, gamification, social learning, and so on, L&D can utilize these avenues to make training more accessible and engaging.

For businesses to stay relevant and thrive in the coming years, engaging employees is critical – but it isn’t straightforward. The onus is on the L&D function to capture the hearts and minds of the employees to nurture talent and build a future-ready workforce to drive business performance.

Join Amit Gautam, CEO of UpsideLMS along with Sudhir Koka, Senior Director - Learning & OD GVK Biosciences and People Matters on January 21, 2021 at 3 PM IST for a live webinar where our speakers will discuss how learning and development can be a great enabler in boosting employee engagement in the coming years.