Vital Insight Into Management Training Success

Are your employees snoozing in the front row of their professional development courses? Perhaps people in the back are playing on their phones? If you’re facing disengaged employees, you’re not alone.

Companies are constantly struggling to keep their employees engaged in professional development, but this doesn’t have to be as difficult as it seems. Take these five actions to improve employee engagement in your organization’s training programs.

Does it often feel like employees are wasting time on the job? According to the Workplace Productivity Poll conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, there seems to be agreement on the top factor that’s hindering productivity: 58% of HR professionals and 49% of employees view poor management as having the most negative impact on their daily efficiency.

So, if your company is suffering from unproductive workers, the first area to evaluate is management. An investment in professional development has the potential to stop an unproductive work environment at the source. Select management training courses that directly impact daily work, with a focus on delegation, discipline, communication, workplace habits and change management.

Communication is the key to building strong, productive relationships between managers and employees. But often, communication breakdowns are difficult to identify and repair. If your organization is lacking the kind of communication effectiveness that bolsters retention and promotes employee satisfaction, your first step is to identify the issue.

Do you find yourself struggling to find an effective manager? Recognizing winning talent doesn’t have to be so stressful when you know what to look for. Evaluate your candidates based on these four essential management skills.

Are you struggling to develop your employees into managers quickly enough? After you invest in a management training program, you want to see the investment pay off – and your employees put those skills into practice.

Promoting from within your team comes with a number of benefits, including:

• Preexisting familiarity with your corporate culture and processes
• Higher job performance in a shorter time frame
• 18-20% lower compensation cost
• Cost savings on internal training and orientation
• Incentive for other team members to work hard for promotion
• A display of team loyalty, which promotes employee retention

With so many advantages to internal promotion, choosing the right professional development program is paramount. To evaluate the state of your current training program, ask yourself these three questions:

When you’re baking a cake, you need every ingredient in the recipe for your dessert to turn out just right. Look at your potential professional development program the same way. You need a training program that encompasses all the elements you want to nurture in your managers.

To choose the most effective training courses for supervisors and managers for your company, focus on these six areas.

Managers are on the front line of your business. They deal with the day-to-day operations of your company and directly impact the productivity of your employees. You want a team of effective leaders running your organization, and providing them with proper management training is the key to achieving that.

What’s your current management development program? A set of old VHS tapes? Maybe you have a new system, but you’re not seeing results. If your managers aren’t excelling, look to your management training program to diagnose the problem.

Bingo! You have an exciting new idea that you want to share with your colleague. But as you begin communicating and start to present the idea to them, they interrupt you with the following statement:

"We shouldn't go through with it. We've tried it before and it didn't work."

Your colleague is not purposefully being difficult; rather they are an evaluative listener. They tend to jump to conclusions before hearing the full idea and without giving it much thought.

As a team leader, you may have experienced the following scenario...

Your team member asks if he/she could have Friday and Monday off to go on a ski weekend. (With the many feet of snow that has blanketed the country this year, who wouldn't want to have a long ski weekend!) You, as the team leader, refuse to authorize this leave because of pressing work deadlines. Your team member takes those two days off to go skiing anyway.

What is “stickiness?” In the context of workplace training, stickiness tracks the level of learner engagement and knowledge retention. A “sticky” training course means that lessons taught in the course are well engrained in the learners’ memory and are likely to actually be applied on the job. So the outstanding million-dollar question: how do we make training stickier? There are many ways to make training more engaging and more memorable and Vital Learning’s courses offer plenty of guidance, but here are a few tips to get started: