Five Types of Training to Improve Employee Performance
When employees are performing at their very best, so is the organization. After all, any organization is really just the sum of its parts. If the parts are rusty, stuck, old, or broken, the whole is not going to be an effective machine. This is why attending to employee performance is critical. In the past, many organizations have done this with annual reviews, but the problem is that all too often, these reviews are largely punitive and do little to improve employee performance. A more effective way to drive employee performance is through effective coaching and training. Below are five types of training known to improve employee performance.
Foreign Language Training
Are you global-ready? Probably not. Communication problems plague an estimated 90% of today’s organizations. Even in a global workforce, most organizations remain sadly oblivious to the complexity of working in a multilingual world, and in North America, defaulting to English is the usual result. The problem is that when you ask employees from other cultures to operate in your language, you are likely asking them to operate in a second or third language, and you may be losing some of their potential expertise along the way. Offering foreign language training is not only a way to drive business and improve employee effectiveness when asked, but a high percentage of employees also say that they would happily engage in foreign-language training if given the opportunity. This means foreign-language training also holds great potential to boost employee engagement too.
Teamwork Training
Training has been found to be a great way to promote teamwork. When teams work together effectively, engagement increases, retention increases, and overall, individual employee performance also soars.
Leadership Training
Effective leadership is closely linked to effective employee performance. Leadership training, then, has a double return on investment. When you train leaders, you are not only investing in leaders but also driving employee performance across the organization. Take, for example, the impact of training leaders to engage in transparent and, subsequently, trustworthy practices. There is now growing evidence that when leaders are perceived to be trustworthy and transparent, employee satisfaction, retention, commitment, organizational citizenship, and performance soar too.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Training
The value of emotional intelligence continues to gain attention across sectors. Despite the somewhat cynical position that EQ can’t really be acquired (some see it as a combination of personality and one’s childhood experiences), there are at least some people who believe one can boost their EQ and that it can impact employee effectiveness. As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Michael Sanger recently reflected in the Harvard Business Review, “While you cannot go from being Woody Allen to being the Dalai Lama, you can avoid stressful situations and inhibit your volatile reactions by detecting your triggers. Start working on tactics that help you become aware of your emotions in real-time, not only in terms of how you experience them but, more importantly, in terms of how they are being experienced by others.”
Training Designed to Increase Flow
According to McKinsey & Company, we are five times more productive when in flow and immensely more creative. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi predicted that the most successful nations in the 21st century will be those that value flow-inducing activities. As Dr. Camille Preston, of Create More Flow, emphasizes, “It’s not surprising. We experience flow when we feel challenged yet capable. We experience flow when we feel a sense of control (self-efficacy) and value (intrinsic motivation) in the work that we are doing. For this reason, creating more flow is essential to fixing the low levels of engagement currently reported in so many workplaces.” Training to increase the flow is part and parcel, then, of driving employee performance.
How to Get Started
Many smaller organizations worry that training is out of their budget. Larger organizations also often assume that training initiatives require a huge budget, months of planning, and dedicated time and resources that they simply don’t have available. Are you training more than five employees? See if you qualify for an employer discount. With a learning management system, it is possible to scale up one’s training–whether it be foreign-language training, leadership training, or training designed to help employees increase flow–in a cost-effective and expedient manner. To get started now, learn more about how to implement a learning management system scaled to respond to your specific workplace.