Development is crucial for your team to learn and your company to function properly. But improving this aspect might not be as easy as you had originally thought. However, there is a solution. Here are three modern steps to improve learning and development for your team.
- Act as a Coach, Not as a Boss
Most of the time a boss will be either pushing or pulling employees to meet their demands. A coach, on the other hand, will be working alongside their people to connect with them individually so they can become something more together.
Being a coach to your team members means creating a more dynamic and meaningful environment for your workers. By customizing your approach to managing different people, you will become someone more than a boss to them.
If you are still unconvinced, here are the top three reasons for being a coach rather than a boss:
- More Engagement: Organizations will only prosper from creating coaching cultures within their structures. You will see more employee engagement thanks to teaching your employees to learn and grow. They will find new, creative ways to deal with daily, arduous tasks and become more involved in the business. A good coach will be supportive and open to new ideas. If you encourage development, your workers will gladly promote it themselves.
- Higher Confidence: The biggest problem with employees who aren’t confident in themselves is that their bosses are probably the reason they became so. By raising your workers’ self-confidence with the help of coaching, you allow them to start growing above themselves and making your company grow too. Coaching can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of each worker as well as help them confront their fears and overcome challenges.
- Better Preparation: By coaching your new and current employees, you make them better prepared for the hardships they may encounter while working in your company. It is crucial to train them and provide them with the means to solve the various problems that arise regularly. Moreover, if your workers are better prepared, they can start advancing in their careers and getting the promotions they deserve.
In order to be a great coach, you must not only show the gaps to your employees but help them become a better version of themselves. Work with each person individually and then think of how their strengths and weaknesses can fit in the bigger picture.
Help them improve in the areas where they are the strongest. You will have the best specialists in a certain sphere if you help your workers become these specialists. You will engage more people if you focus on the strengths rather than the weaknesses as looking at the bright side motivates much better than dwelling on the negative one.
- Focus on Microlearning, Rather Than Maсrolearning
Microlearning focuses on learning pieces of information quickly and in small portions in order to get the most impact with the least learning effort. Macrolearning looks at the bigger picture as it requires longer periods of learning that covers broader topics and requires more investment in terms of time and effort.
To put it simply, macrolearning is what we are all used to. Courses and other kinds of training are common in many companies, while microlearning has a completely different idea at its core.
Macrolearning relies on instructors such as mentors, trainers, or coaches to deliver information over time. You are expected to complete quizzes and pass exams in order to demonstrate your progress and understanding of the subject material. Elearning has made an impact on macrolearning, but it didn’t change the latter fundamentally.
Usually, macrolearning is used to give new employees a bigger picture of what is going on in the company and what will be their job. The downside of this approach is that is not flexible and can’t provide access to specific information. You can’t access the small piece of information without going through everything else.
Microlearning addresses the flaws of macrolearning and creates a completely different learning environment that is not confined by the classroom. It is just as effective as an online translation service (such as The Word Point) that you use to address an immediate task which is translating your documents in this case.
Microlearning delivers small pieces of information that can be easily digested by the learners. You don’t need a lot of time to understand it and it is accessible without having to go through all the other information to get to this small chunk.
At its core, you could say that microlearning is macrolearning repurposed. The content from Elearning courses is edited to become accessible through various searchable resources. These are available not only from your desktop but also from other mobile devices you can check on the go. Your employees no longer have to study everything and can access what they need when they need it.
You could say that microlearning mimics social media, search engines, and wiki sites where we can ask a question and it will be immediately answered. This way, microlearning has some informal elements that allow learners to become more efficient in their jobs.
The downsides of microlearning such as the chance of discovering false information are not numerous and don’t pose a big threat. Ultimately, microlearning is the way to creating a better learning environment in your organization.
- Provide Your Employees with a Clear Set of Benefits from Learning & Development
Lastly, you must show your employees the benefits that come along with learning and development. This set of advantages can become a great motivator and will inspire your workers to become better through learning and developing themselves.
Your aim here is to “market” learning and development to your employees as something that will make their lives better in different ways. Encouraging them to investigate the ways they can benefit from learning is crucial for them to realize why it’s so important.
Show that learning is not about doing chores but about fun. If you find innovative ways to present different important pieces of information to your team, you will be successful in persuading them to start developing.
If you notice that someone is being distracted from the learning process, gently steer them back to it. Ask them why they got uninterested and find ways to persuade them to get back to it by promoting the different benefits they get. Laziness is a part of human nature and you will often confront it in different situations of such kind.
To help you find the right learning and development benefits to market to your employees, here are a few examples you could use:
- Communication: Your employees will be able to communicate with people from all over the world with different cultures, languages, and customs.
- Safety: If your employees work with heavy machinery on a daily basis, improving their skills will help them ensure that they are much safer in the workplace.
- Computer Skills: Not everyone is an IT genius, but having computer skills is essential in the modern world. Your employees can improve these through training.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, training your team to become an improved version of itself is essential for your team members to become better. Follow the advice in this article to make your employees fall in love with learning and develop in the right direction.
William Rodgers is a freelance writer and blogger. As he speaks several foreign languages, William’s main focus is writing SEO articles for businesses which want to drive their brand in the international market. His goal is to continually help more marketers fill Google search results with content that really matters
Feel free to contact him here https://twitter.com/William81597390
