Is your corporate training program inclusive? If not, here’s how you yan do it.
However, surprisingly, even the greatest of the companies with impeccable work culture often gloss over accessibility in their workplace design and inclusion in regards to training and development as an afterthought.
It’s crucial for every organization and its leadership to understand that training employees will never have a one-size-fits-all solution. Every employee has a different learning capability. They interact and engage with the program in different ways. Therefore, they can not be expected to yield similar results. That’s simply impractical.
That’s where inclusive training plays an important role. Inclusive training includes the steps that you take to remove every hindrance that prevents or could prevent your workforce from reaching their full potential.
The more inclusive and accessible your training is, the more it’ll help employees retain what they learn. It helps a majority of employees stay engaged and, consequently, improve the ROI of the program.
Here’s how you can achieve greater engagement and ROI:
Use the Right Language
Start by adopting an LMS that offers multilingual features. Take Totara LMS, for example. Once you have an LMS that supports different languages, identify the linguistic capabilities of your team members. Even if you have English as your working language, you can still translate training in the language that a maximum number of your employees speak.
When they learn in their own language, this helps them retain information and understand concepts better.
You should also tone down your training. Make it more user-friendly, avoid technical terms, steer clear of jargon, and use shorter sentences.
Adopt Different Methods to Deliver Content
We’ve already talked about how different learners have different capabilities to engage with the content. Thus, finding different ways to deliver content to your employees is considered one of the best practices.
While a few might learn better with employees, there are others who may prefer PDFs or infographics to grasp the content better. You should consider offering different options to employees if you want your training to be inclusive and effective.
Also, be sure that your content can be accessed from different operating systems on different devices. This will allow your employees to engage in microlearning and be a part of the program even when they’re on the go.
Consider Age and Technology Literacy Gaps
Your entire workforce will not be tech-savvy, and you need to keep this in mind. In an organization, you will not only find millennials that are comfortable around technology. You have your workforce that is built of individuals from varied generations.
While you wouldn’t want the baby boomers in your team to feel left out, you also wouldn’t want your millennials to lose interest. So, how do you create a balance? By pairing individuals from different age groups together.
Make employees from different generations and tech skills study buddies. While millennials can play their part in helping the older generation learn about technology, baby boomers can help millennials learn from their experience.
Encourage Self-Paced Learning
As companies adopt remote working as their permanent or temporary work arrangement, remote training with the help of different online courses became a norm. However, the workplace was not the only change that individuals had to face.
Those in the workforce working from home had to deal with changes that were taking place at their home as well. Many have kids who are homeschooling or may need to take care of elderly family members. It is likely that their stress levels are higher than usual.
It’s true that the training program should be completed on time and it’s important for everyone to be involved. However, inclusive training means offering flexibility and encouraging self-paced learning.
Conclusion
Inclusive training in today’s time is a crucial practice. The best ways to make your training more inclusive is by using different languages, delivering content in more than one way, pairing up different employees from different generations together, and encouraging self-paced learning. The more inclusive you make your training, the more successful it’ll be.
