How to Engage Managers in eLearning
Managers play a crucial role in the professional wellbeing of an organisation. Consider this: managers interact with frontline employees on a daily basis and it’s these employees who are last to touch your product before it reaches your customers, or deliver your service. This highlights the importance of regularly training the leaders in your organisation so they can inspire and motivate their teams to give their best.
Appropriate eLearning is an effective medium for delivering management level training as it allows the autonomy managers are accustomed to and the flexibility for easily slotting training into busy work schedules. Critical to the success of eLearning for managers, is delivering meaningful information pitched at the right level and structuring it in a way that puts the user in control.
Here are 4 ways PulseLearning effectively engages managers in eLearning.
- Assume a high-level of experience, skill and knowledge
Acknowledging prior professional and personal experience is a key adult learning principle and at management level we can assume the employee has become a leader due to excelling in their role. The eLearning you deliver to your managers should respect the skill and knowledge level of these employees and use aligned language and context. Your eLearning should also include strategies for saving time and avoiding training managers in current proficiencies. Streamed pre-testing is an effective method for allowing the user to skip topics for which they have already achieved competency. In this method, a series of questions can be linked to each topic in the training, if answered correctly the user can skip the topic content.
2. Allow autonomy
Generally, the level of autonomy an employee has is linked to the hierarchical level of their role. Managers are accustomed to making key business decisions, instructing others and managing their own time. With that said, eLearning delivered to management level employees should allow the user to control how and when they will complete the training. A module or course can be divided into small chunks using a ‘burst learning’ approach so managers can easily fit training around other tasks. Management level learning should be explorative and provoke self-reflection while encouraging research and information finding.
3. Use information efficiency strategies
We can also assume that managers are busy people with a lot on their professional plates. eLearning training should get to the point quickly in a memorable way rather than requiring managers to trawl through vast information. Sound instructional design methodologies should be used to organise information for ease of accessibility and retention, and consolidate key learning points when necessary. Quick reference guides and checklists can work well for managers as they allow insight into overall the content in a condensed format
4. Make it relatable
First, ensure you are providing valuable information required by your organisation. Identify and evaluate problem areas such as high turnover, low productivity and decreased morale then develop targeted eLearning to assist in rectifying the issues. Make the content relatable by using real life scenarios and statistics from within your organisation. Interspersed employee interview videos can further enhance the learning experience so managers can hear the real impact of their decisions at the day-to-day operational level of the business.
