This has been the year of the Employee Experience (EX), the consumer-grade UX and the ongoing war for talent. In other words, in an increasingly competitive job market, it becomes very important to retain your top performers. Better employee experiences help you retain top talent - and can also help your bottom line. In fact, your company's survival can depend on keeping top performers.
Here's how modern, consumer-grade training is helping companies attract and retain talent:
Promote a modern, innovative brand
Picture your on-boarding as if you were an employee on a first date with your company. How would you describe your experience? Are there butterflies? If not, what could be improved?
Great first impressions are seamless, intuitive, clear, timely, personalized, easy to use and helpful. They build the excitement and energy of joining a new company and quickly ramp the new employee into being a productive team member.
Carefully craft the first experience of your employees. Training is an easy way to communicate your unique brand. Cultural training in your onboarding process ensures employees understand company values from the very beginning. A great training platform makes creating and delivering training easy, but also shows you are an innovative company. A poor training platform hurts compliance, as well as communicates that you have an antiquated, stodgy or dysfunctional brand and culture.
Another reason to begin a training program early! Businesses with a strong learning culture enjoy employee engagement and retention rates around 30-50% higher than those that don’t. (Robert Half)
A Consumer-Grade Experience
What if we acted as though our survival depended on each successful employee interaction?
Hint: it absolutely does.
Creating consumer-grade experiences simply means treating our employees as customers. To retain top talent, treat the employee experience with the same mission-critical importance as a retailer treats an abandoned shopping cart!
HR Executives are increasing their focus on modern, consumer-grade, engaged, innovative and digital employee experiences. In fact, more than half of CHROs (56%) say the ability to create a digital, consumerized experience will define their roles in the next three years. (ServiceNow)
Here are a few ways that PlatCore creates a consumer-grade experience for Learning Management:
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Easy to access - Eliminate additional friction points, such as additional downloads, logins or passwords (consider the cost each time your entire company downloads flash).
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Intuitive - Make it easy to find assigned courses or elect interesting new training!
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Available anytime, anywhere - As consumers, technology meets us where we are – EVERYWHERE! The reality is that we take training on the road, on our way to work – or sometimes on the treadmill. Your staff will be more attentive when they can choose when, and where, they complete training!
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Automated - Manual processes are subject to human error (such as vacations, workload, sticky notes). Automating training and reminders provide consistent experiences, eliminates menial tasks and improves learner adoption.
How does your LMS stack up? If your legacy or homegrown LMS struggles to provide a proper user experience, it may be hurting your company.
Internal workforce development
Benefits of internal workforce development include; building intellectual property, increasing productivity and longevity of top performers, a thriving company culture, expanding worker capacity, and so much more.
Additionally, internal workforce development provides a very real financial incentive:
- The cost to replace a highly-trained employee can exceed 200 percent of their annual salary. (American Progress)
- Employee turnover is anticipated to hit record highs and cost U.S. companies more than $600 billion this year. (Work Institute)
- Work Institute estimates that 42 million, or one in four, employees will leave their jobs in 2018, and that nearly 77 percent, or three-fourths, of that turnover could be prevented by employers. (Work Institute)
Additionally, consider what happens to your workforce if you don't invest in them?
CFO asks CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?” CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?” ~Peter Baeklund
Here are a few ways training can help develop your workforce:
- Ongoing education - Training is a great benefit to your employees, and it also benefits the company. Learning Managment Systems also provide a platform to reinforce company culture and organizational change.
- Centralized Training Catalog - Create listings of approved online or instructor-led training. Make it easy for employees to take required training, elect new training, sign up for courses, or manage transcripts & certifications.
- Automate and Streamlined Processes - Simplify the approval process and allow employees to easily submit training requests. Automate repeating training, send reminders by role to ensure timely completion. Create audit reports in minutes.
- View Training History - Easily access and take action on training history - such as incentives, customized support, asset provisioning, promotion and more. Managers and administrators get to customize Real-time reports and dashboards.
In conclusion:
To attract and retain our top talent, we are driven to provide improved experiences and processes. This is helping rationalize systems that reduce friction and are easier for ourselves and our fellow employees. The benefits are financially sound but also result in a far happier and more productive workforce. Modern, consumer-grade training can help you drive this better employee experience - and win the war for talent.
In the end, is it a war for talent if you let your best people walk out the door?
