The ‘WIIFM’ Question – Motivating your learners to complete their training

Posted 3 years ago

As the person responsible for ensuring your staff’s training is completed, we understand that it can seem like herding cats! Part of the reason it can be such a difficult task is because of a question that has a say in almost every decision we make – What’s in it for me? Training administrators that are partnered with a boring eLearning provider will dread this question, because other than helping the company work towards legislative compliance and improving the learners own safety/knowledge in a particular field, the training itself doesn’t really have much to offer and it’s usually incredibly dull (See why boring eLearning no longer works).

Good eLearning that engages users should do a very good job at answering this question for you, but it’s all about getting over that first hurdle and actually getting your learners to complete their first course.

With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to share some tried and tested techniques for motivating staff to complete their online training.

Schedule your training

Create a training plan that can be shared throughout your organisation. Set realistic deadlines and mark out clear parameters (which courses need to be completed and when). Try not to allocate all courses at once, releasing them one at a time will be much more effective. Once a client is on board with us, their training administrator will receive a simple training schedule that allows to keep ahead of training requirements, plan when staff will complete training and schedule any calls in with their Account Manager at iHasco.

Keep things simple

Having complex systems in place that make eLearning difficult to access will do you no favours. Send emails to staff with links to their training so they never lose it, make it clear which courses they need to complete and by when and make sure the training itself is easy to navigate.

At iHasco we pride ourselves on making training simple for our clients – our training is compatible with any device, our ‘smart’ dashboard proactively organises training and our automated emails make administrators lives much easier! See our full feature list here.

Make it relevant

Motivation works best when you deliver relevant information, critical to the person’s job function, right at the time they need to know it. Asking someone to complete their working at height training when they have no projects on the horizon will not get the same response as making it a mandatory requirement at the next project launch where the course is suitable.

The clear benefits of training

Employees should see the clear relationship between training and success, but this should be made explicitly clear, so make sure you shout it from the rooftops! Benefits of training can range from achieving promotions, reducing stress levels or even just being able to do your daily job better!

If staff can see a clear correlation between how training will benefit them, the team and wider company goals, then there can be no arguments.

Incentivise

Motivate your staff to complete their training by offering incentives. We run a monthly eLearning competition and our learners the opportunity to win awesome prizes – all they have to do is complete an iHasco eLearning course and if you share some love via social media you increase your chance of winning!

Communication is key

You need to make it clear to your staff that they have the training to complete and telling them verbally won’t always be enough! Why not start off with a ‘pre-training’ email, outlining what the training is about, why it needs to be done and a time-frame for them to complete it in? Then follow up with another email halfway through that time frame… that way, nobody should complain!

We hope that armed with these 6 tactics, you’ll be able to enlighten your employees and get rid of the dreaded WIIFM question forever!