Employee engagement is declining. According to Gallup research, fewer than one-third of U.S. employees (32%) are engaged at work, meaning most of your workforce doesn’t feel connected. That holds huge consequences for attrition, recruiting costs, productivity, performance and even your employer brand (as disgruntled employees will tell others about their experience).
Learning and development (L&D) plays a critical part in improving employee engagement. The first step is understanding how learning feeds impacts the employee experience.
What Drives Employee Engagement?
The same research found that the most disengaged employees had unmet needs in five key areas:
- Clarity of role expectations.
- Connection to their employer’s mission or purpose.
- Opportunities to learn and grow.
- Opportunities to achieve their best work.
- Feeling cared about at work.
Learning might appear once in that list, but in truth, it connects to every one of these areas. Offering the right learning opportunities to employees doesn’t just help them grow, it equips them with the skills they need to achieve their best work. It helps them get clear on their role expectations and the skills needed for that role. Investing in employees’ future skills shows care for their long-term career development.
Providing learning opportunities that connect with learners’ interests and purpose gives them something in their workday that transcends beyond daily tasks and can give them a greater sense of fulfillment.
High Performance and Learning Go Hand-in-hand
Many companies are working toward building high-performing cultures and teams and leveraging this to drive business performance and outcomes. But you can’t really have a high-performing organization if the majority of your workforce is disengaged and there isn’t an active investment in learning.
The “active” part is critical here. Investing in a learning resource, installing it and launching it isn’t enough to drive long-term engagement. Continuous learning is needed to really have an impact and to build the kind of agility organizations need to succeed in the future. That comes when everyone is motivated to learn (and managers are proactively encouraging their teams to learn), where there’s a reward element to learning, and where learning is embedded in your culture.
Motivating People To Learn
This is an area where L&D teams can really borrow some best practices from their colleagues in marketing. After all, marketers are well-versed in behavior change. How does this translate into L&D?
Meet learners where they are.
Firstly, know your audience. You cannot encourage someone to learn without tapping into their “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM). Personalizing learning to meet an employee’s needs today and their goals tomorrow gives a powerful incentive for someone to engage with the available opportunities.
In practice, this would give completely different learning experiences to an entry-level employee versus someone who has been in their role or department for several years. Each individual can be set up to embark on a path of learning that considers the long term. Whether that’s specializing in a set of business-critical skills, moving up the career ladder, or broadening their skill set to better respond to disruption.
Take advantage of key moments.
Another thing that marketers are good at is sending the right message at the right time. There are moments in everyone’s careers when they are more receptive to learning opportunities like when going for a promotion, post-qualification when they’re considering their next steps, or when newly promoted to a people manager role.
Get manager buy-in.
Managers play a crucial role in encouraging their teams to consistently build new skills. It’s worth spending some time getting managers on board with your learning plans. They can provide accountability for learning and provide a regular check-in point (during team meetings and one-on-ones).
Moreover, managers are the bridge between the business, team and individual goals. They have the oversight needed to ensure learning is aligned with what their department and the business needs, while balancing this with individual aspirations.
Offer many learning opportunities.
Learning comes in many shapes and sizes today, from everyday informal learning through videos and bite-sized modules to deep skill building via online learning academies. Offering a range of opportunities gives employees the freedom to decide on what suits and interests them.
Think of it almost like a personal fitness training program. The best trainers work with their clients to understand the exercises that get them the most excited, but also move them toward their goals. Building a learning experience around each individual achieves the same thing — keeping them engaged for the long term so that you can both achieve great things through learning.
To supplement your organization’s learning offerings, consider providing education benefits or learning stipends to employees, which gives them the ability to partake in learning that suits their needs and interests. This almost acts like someone going to a gym in their spare time to continue working toward their goals. As a result, you end up with a multi-layered experience where a learner has their courses and resources bought through their stipend, plus everyday learning opportunities curated by their L&D team.
State the “why” for learning.
Connecting the dots between performance and business outcomes and the learning that someone is doing gives them a clear “why” for their efforts. It encourages someone to make learning more of a habit because they understand that an hour spent on learning equates to greater performance, career prospects, and the overall success of the business.
Speaking of which, consulting with business colleagues is becoming more of a priority for L&D teams — for good reason. Close alignment between department heads and L&D allows both to collaborate on building needed skills and closing skill gaps. It also helps L&D remain updated with any initiatives that learning can contribute to, plus it avoids L&D pushing a course or resource that may become outdated because of a team change.
One challenge to be mindful of is that, as humans, we seek instant gratification more than longer-term payoffs. It’s difficult to do anything if you don’t experience results for months or even years. Managers can be supportive here by rewarding and recognizing their teams for learning by giving them further opportunities to develop. Even a simple “learner of the month” recognition as a team or a company can spur someone on. Likewise, setting manageable, shorter-term goals can help someone remain on track for longer-term skill-building.
Embed learning in your culture.
Your company culture is integral to the eventual success of your learning strategy. If there’s a buzz around learning in your organization, people will feel more bought into new opportunities that come their way. Establishing psychological safety, where people are free to make and learn from mistakes, will also accelerate learning in your organization. As the saying goes, “Fail fast and learn fast.”
Your organizational design also matters. Asking someone to work a 60-hour week plus complete five hours of training is never going to motivate them long-term. Nor will it build a positive learning culture. There needs to be set times for learning in everyone’s week (including leadership, as they can model learning to the wider organization).
Learning today impacts tomorrow.
By creating a learning experience that engages people with the topics that interest them at the right time, you are making an investment that will accumulate over time. There are many avenues to achieve what you need as a business and an individual. The key is having the openness to innovate with different learning opportunities and the focus to keep your learners and workforce skills aligned with the business.
