The worst time for a business to train its employees is when it’s trying to keep its head above water. False! We often have the mistaken impression that we have to push employees to use the skills already acquired and avoid developing new ones in the most challenging times. This is especially true in a year like 2020, which necessitates an economic recovery.
However, the economic changes brought on by the pandemic have shown a strong demand in the mobilization of existing talent. In fact, employers could benefit from having versatile employees and from recruiting in-house as they redefine job positions. The most significant impact of the pandemic has probably been the high amount of layoffs and the high unemployment rate observed. When even the most prosperous industries cannot afford to hire new talent, it is evident that there is a need to invest in a workforce that can adapt to changing market conditions. Let’s see how training benefits an organization and, more generally, economic recovery.
What are the Positive Aspects of Training?
It is wrong to view employee training only as a way to survive a global pandemic. It has many benefits, including employee retention and engagement, recruiting new talent, better collaboration between departments, participation in the economic recovery and faster adoption of new initiatives within the company.
Reorganizing the workforce offers opportunities for the company to maximize the potential of its employees and allow them to keep their jobs and expand their skills in various fields. Providing training on-demand, at home or in the office, will enable them to improve their skills and acquire new ones, thanks to a personalized system.
Handling Job Vacancies
Responsibilities no longer covered by an employee still need to be taken care of. Fortunately, the skills to do it are already within your organization. You just have to change your mindset. Ideally, you want your employees to be adaptable.
Training makes it possible to provide the missing knowledge to reassign current talent in your organization to a new position or new tasks. The most flexible, versatile and ready-to-learn companies are the ones that survive the fluctuations of the economic market the best—knowing how to adapt to change pays off!
You can start by identifying roles that share similar skills, identifying internal employees who may have those skills, and providing training tailored to meet your business needs.
How to Implement it Internally?
Bring up the Subject with your Employees
Involving employees in the training process allows you to count on their full collaboration and increase their level of commitment to the company’s mission and maximize their skills by validating their interests directly with them. An employee who enjoys what he does is more inclined to give his 100% and be autonomous in his training.
In short, including managers and employees in the internal training strategy increases the return on investment and, therefore, the organization’s profitability.
Now, let’s see how to bring it up with them openly.
1. Automate
When you want to train your employees, now is not the best time to overload them with tasks. Prepare and automate your training materials ahead of time to make it easy for them to get started quickly and hassle-free. Thus, they will be ready for their new role faster.
Save Time = Save Money
Your employees’ time is short and expensive. Therefore, it should be spent on your business’s development strategy and organization, not on the management of superfluous elements.
Provide your managers and employees with automated and personalized content for a successful strategy while saving them headaches.
2. Share Ideas
By having fewer people in the organization, it’s more important than ever to collaborate on everything. Indeed, a work environment based on collaborative learning is favourable to intuitive and fluid training because not only will the training system in place be better used, but your employees will also seek education among themselves. So that’s more knowledge for the same effort.
With changes as rapid and radical as we know, it must be easy to integrate training into the everyday workflow. The ideal is to provide “students” with modules classified by topic, specifically created for their new role. The skills acquired, formal and informal, are therefore available depending on the subjects affected and the work teams in the organization.
Keep in mind that relevant, easy-to-find content makes training much better and faster.
3. Make the Most of Distance Learning
Children aren’t the only ones who benefit from distance learning. Smart devices play a crucial role in learning in the workplace, like everywhere else, especially when it comes to remote work. These devices are one way to reach your employees for a micro-learning session that will greatly benefit them and your organization.
In other words, you need to adapt your strategy to mobile devices to optimize your results in 2021. Since most people are familiar with Google and YouTube, your training should offer a similar model, therefore instinctive. In the end, they are all complementary tools to learning.
Making online learning accessible ensures that your workforce remains engaged and equipped to follow the plan you have in mind. Your success depends on it.
What Role does Artificial Intelligence Play?
Workers who inherit new tasks and new employees require an investment in training to promote the use of technology within your company. This information probably doesn’t surprise you. However, it is not uncommon for managers to notice that a mismatch between the skills of the current workforce and those of a potential one is responsible for unfilled positions.
In the context of economic recovery, it is not possible to hire new talents. We must therefore play with the cards we have in hand.
Technological advances in artificial intelligence and automation will likely fix this problem in the long run. However, ignoring this situation today will have severe consequences for the labour market in the future. The right reflex is rather to train current employees to enable them to acquire the missing skills and fill the tasks of the unfilled positions.
The world of work is changing rapidly and constantly, so it is essential to have an adequate training strategy. This develops flexibility and efficiency in the company, which will only positively affect the short and long term.
In Short, Bet on your Employees
You can achieve ambitious goals without breaking your head too much by providing your employees with tailored training programs, where collaborative learning is encouraged, easy to access and mobile. These opportunities will also allow you to target the most agile and versatile talents in your organization to establish a winning relationship with them.
Talent retention is more than necessary, especially in difficult times like 2020-2021. These employees, in particular, will help you achieve your most lofty goals and play a pillar role with new hires for many years to come.
Through in-house training, take a moment to assess your business and determine the best way to optimize your current situation. In the short and medium term, plan your first actions to improve learning and development processes with a view to a more promising future.
