After a year of remote work, I think we’re all missing that feeling of connection you get from being physically in the office, from simple things like water-cooler conversations and celebrating big wins with a team lunch to awkwardly singing happy birthday to someone in the break room. It’s those informal moments that bring a team closer together and contribute to employee engagement.
With no end to remote work in sight, it’s mission-critical for organizations to find other ways to keep workers engaged.
According to Monster, 69% of employees are experiencing burnout while working from home. Burnt-out employees are less engaged, and thus, less productive. So what can you do to re-engage your team? Providing a personalized learning experience through your Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Experience Platform (LXP) engages workers—no matter where they are.
Personalized learning has been used in classrooms for many years. It’s time to start implementing this concept in the workplace too. After all, case studies [1] have found that implementing technology in the classroom to create personalized learning plans increases student achievement and improves test scores by an average of 30%.
What workplace wouldn’t want to replicate those results?
Today’s learners are looking to grow and develop, not just within their current role’s needs but for future roles as well. With the right Learning Experience Platform, you can deliver personalized content to your learners based on their skill gaps and interests.
Have each worker complete a pre-assessment module inside your learning platform. Based on their assessment results, you can automatically enroll them in a specific course of content you’ve already created that matches their interests and areas of opportunity for skills growth.
Using an LMS or LXP focused on user experience, you should be able to include a combination of formal, informal, and blended learning in these customized learning paths.
The end result? Workers waste less time re-training on topics they’re already proficient in, are more engaged, and ultimately become more skilled workers! It’s a win-win for your organization and your employees.
Everyone likes feeling like they have something worth sharing, so it’s easy to see why User-Generated Content options [2] are one of the most requested features in a learning platform.
By allowing your workers to easily create and share content in your learning platform, you give them the recognition and visibility they might feel they’ve been missing since going remote.
Plus, in a 2018 survey [3], 75% of respondents stated that User-Generated Content makes content more authentic. If you’re searching for a way to build more of a community feel among your workers, this is the answer.
Create channels or playlists in your LXP specifically for User-Generated Content. Uploaded content can be as simple as a quick screen recording of a software hack to a more detailed step-by-step tutorial in a PowerPoint presentation. You might be surprised at the knowledge your workers have to share!
It’s a classic business trope: “I survived another meeting that could have been an email.”
Zoom meetings, once the savior of companies unprepared for an entirely remote workforce, are finding themselves the subject of many memes and complaints after a year of “I think you’re on mute, Steve” and “How do I turn this cat filter off? I’m here, I’m not a cat, I swear.”
And it’s not just Zoom meetings. It’s GoToWebinar, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and more. Many companies use multiple services depending on a meeting’s purpose or goal. What if you could help your workers keep track of all those meetings in one centralized calendar—plus get credit and recognition for attending important meetings or trainings?
With the right Learning Experience Platform, you can integrate all those events for Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) into courses and learning pathways. Imagine being able to make a VILT presentation a prerequisite for unlocking the next level of eLearning modules!
By blending VILT with a personalized eLearning path and access to the User-Generated Content that your workers are interested in, you’ve got yourself a sure strategy for user engagement. Try out these personalized learning tips today to keep your remote workers feeling connected and engaged.
References:
[1] How Education Technology Leads to Improved Student Achievement
[2] Amp Up Knowledge with Channels
[3] 9 Things We Learned From Our User-Generated Content Study
Editor's note: this article was originally published on eLearningIndustry.com on March 15, 2021.