Get more out of your people with the right motivation

You want to get more out of your team and excite them to take on new challenges. But how do you realize that? And is your team waiting for that? In this article you can read how we, as an online training provider, deal with this and give tips to encourage the right learning motivation.

The forgetting curve

You think it's important that your employees develop and send them to a course or training. Unfortunately, a month later it turns out that no one is doing anything with the knowledge they have gained. How can that be? German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus researched it. Although this was the most unreliable study ever (he was the only respondent), his classic forgetting curve is still often cited. What it showed: within three weeks, he had forgotten 92 percent of what he had learned.

With this knowledge, how can you as a manager still motivate employees to take training courses? To make them learn new things so that they become more productive, creative or innovative? First of all, by no longer seeing learning as the end, but the means. The goal should be to make people perform better. And the means to that can be online learning.

Performance support

Consider, for example, the Excel course you yourself once took. Motivated, you got into the car on the way to the course center. Finally you were going to learn how to work with complicated pivot tables. In the class of twelve students, however, you were explained about rows, columns and cells. Only in the afternoon did the pivot tables come up; a lot of time wasted.

The rule in 2020, especially for online learning, is: learn what you need and when you need it. If you take that route, it's also not a big deal that we don't remember 92 percent of what we've learned after a month. Because if you need to create a pivot table filter in Excel, you simply watch an online instruction video at that moment. We call that in proper Dutch: performance support. Apply instead of memorize.

Facilitation is not enough

Problem solved you might think. To get more out of your team, all you have to do is facilitate an Internet connection. Especially now that the range of training is so vast, both online and offline. Yet this method doesn't work for everyone. For example, we at SkillsTown noticed several years ago that only 15 to 25 percent of employees continue to train and develop on their own initiative.

When the boss only facilitates a login for an online training offering, about 15 percent of employees don't even log in or sign up. 40 to 60 percent of employees take a quick look at what's on offer at first. But once the manager no longer has a finger on the pulse, they still drop out.

Special approach

So just facilitating lifelong learning is not enough, was the conclusion. And so we figured out how to get employees in learning mode. With our approach, we get at least 80 percent of employees motivated to learn.

Important conclusion: make online learning part of organizational policy. Simply sharing a login is therefore not enough. In addition, how you motivate him or her to learn more depends on the type of employee. In order to do so successfully, we have listed a number of tips for each type of employee:

1. The "benevolent

The small group that continues to train and develop itself should be facilitated. In other words, offer training that is useful to them and fits their interests and urgency.

2. The "quickly demotivated

The group that drops out after a while is the one you should especially encourage. For example, with social proof power. If you went for a drink at that new café because a friend tipped you off, then there is social proof. Encourage employees to give recommendations or write a blog on the intranet. So that they say to each other, "this is an interesting training course.

3. The 'refuser'

For the group that does not even log in or enroll, it is important to find out why they are not getting into learning mode. As a manager, engage with these employees and analyze the issue. What is blocking the employee? Then remove those blockages for them.

Pitfalls

A major roadblock for all workers is the time factor. Two-thirds of staff do not get into activity mode quickly because of lack of time. So as a manager, you need to facilitate time.

By the way, that is not the same as making training mandatory. You want to work with a professional team, so make professional arrangements. By putting a course in your stomach, you miss the point. What does work is making clear agreements about what you want to achieve together. Then it doesn't feel like an obligation and that makes learning more attractive.

Find the motivation mode

Finally, it is important to make learning fun. Because if something is not fun, you will learn less. For example, some children can't get the capital cities of European countries memorized, but they know exactly how much power each character has from 2,000 Pokémon cards. That has everything to do with motivation.

Make sure the training connects to your employees' interests, has urgency in it, and/or the method of learning is motivating. For example, you can add gamification or another competitive element to training sessions. If you don't succeed in appealing to the learning motivation of your employees, then learning really becomes a difficult story.

Wondering how others are handling this?

Want to know how other organizations are boosting employee learning motivation? Then take a look among our customer cases. There you can read, for example, how Stichting Transport en Logistiek activated 81% of their employees to get into learning mode within 7 months.