Employees who have no desire to develop are usually of no interest to business. The world, including the professional, is changing rapidly. New technologies, methodologies, and approaches appear. To stay afloat, you have to learn new things, sift out unnecessary things and optimize your work.

Employees without personal development hold back the company’s growth. With time they degrade themselves. One of the main tasks of a business owner today is to encourage employees and give them a chance to progress in their professional sphere. It is desirable to offer a choice – to grow horizontally as a specialist or vertically as a manager.

Professional growth is especially important in companies that provide various types of services. The staff of writemyessays argues that only the constant improvement of the knowledge of both managers and writers allows them to be competitive and provide only the best services to their clients.

We tell you how to build a system of motivation for learning and, as a result, grow a professional team with developed competencies.

How to motivate employees to attend training: office motivation ideas

Ask your employees

The process of training employees in many companies is built in isolation from the employees’ opinions. Managers look for trainers or educational agencies and decide which skills need to be taught to their subordinates.

Try approaching the process from a different angle. Conduct a survey and individual interviews with people. Ask which trainers in their industry they consider experts and from whom they would like to learn themselves. Perhaps there are courses they plan to take but are stopped by the high price.

By gathering information, you can build a process for selecting educational contractors with employees’ opinions in mind. In the long run, this will increase motivation and loyalty to the company – people enjoy working where they are listened to.

Turn training into a privilege

Monetary rewards can’t be the cause of constant employee motivation. At first, they cause a spike in productivity. But then the effectiveness of this method of rewarding falls off.

So the manager needs to look for other methods. You can turn training from a mandatory process into a privilege. For example, send your best employees to expensive courses that they themselves would like to complete but don’t have the time or money for.

Make time for training

Offer employees not only tuition but also time to learn skills. It’s unlikely that everyone has the energy and time to attend additional courses after a busy day at work. People need to take care of family matters, resolve household issues, and rest.

Build training into employees’ work schedules.

Don’t reduce pay

If you build training into your work schedule, it makes sense to adjust their KPIs. Obviously, a sales manager will close fewer deals if they spend work hours on training. And this should not be perceived as a problem or his failure, nor should it affect his salary.

If you explicitly or indirectly reduce people’s financial motivation, this will eventually reduce their motivation not only for the learning process but also for the work itself. Don’t make learning a punishment.

Use short formats

Another way to combat time constraints and increase motivation for training is to use microformats. According to Evernote, today’s employees have 24 minutes a week to self-study. Instead of finding extra hours for traditional courses, give employees the option to use short educational sessions.

• find a video course that has lessons that last 10-15 minutes each;
• develop an app in which the lesson can be completed in a short amount of time;
• prepare educational articles for employees to read in 5-10 minutes.

Make training mobile

Try to make training as accessible as possible. Give employees the option of mobile training. For example, you can buy a video course that they can watch from any device. Hold online training sessions in Zoom or other video conferencing software. Finally, use text and graphic formats – articles and infographics are easy to follow on a smartphone, too.

Build training into your career path

Develop a transparent and understandable career development system. A newcomer to the easiest position should understand what positions he can strive for and what successes he needs to achieve.

It is worth introducing a system of grades or levels. The main thing in them – clearly spelled out criteria and clear motivation for growth.

In Brief: How to Motivate a Team to Develop Professionally

Looking for staff training ideas, build a transparent system in which employees understand why they need to learn. And after that, create opportunities.

1. Ask employees who they would like to learn from and what skills they would like to acquire. Build a training list based on the desires of your colleagues.
2. Make training a part of motivation, a privilege. Give your employees expensive training for their performance, thereby creating a competitive effect in the team and motivating people to develop.
3. Usually, your coworkers just don’t have time to learn. Training is part of the job, so find time in their work schedule for education.
4. If employees study during work hours, they will have less time to do. Don’t reduce pay for it, adjust KPIs. Don’t turn training into a financial penalty.
5. Use short formats. Taking a long course is harder than completing a three-day intensive or taking 15-minute lessons on a mobile app.
6. Build training into employee development. People need to understand – if they want salary and position growth, they need to develop.

Most importantly, choose educational products that are useful to your employees. If people don’t feel the benefit of the courses, it will be harder for them to learn. If, on the contrary, the education proves to be practical and useful, there will be no internal resistance.

Methods to avoid

And now let’s look at the methods that are strictly forbidden in corporate training:

1. Penalties. Why should you deprive an employee or even an entire department of bonuses if they simply do not want to attend your training sessions? Explain to your colleagues why they suddenly need training. Talk to them – this is much more effective than imposing sanctions on employees. Such corporate policies may even force a talented employee to leave your company, and it will be the HR specialist’s fault.
2. Reprimands and punishments. These methods of motivation are just as inhuman as fines. If you motivate employees to learn in this way, you can get the whole team fired up.
3. Material factors. Promotion, accrual of bonuses in exchange for tasks within the framework of corporate training interests only 14% of employees. This method can rightfully be considered outdated.