Regardless of your industry or business model, every business wants to improve productivity, which allows you to produce more revenue without increasing costs. Increased productivity is the holy grail when it comes to managing your business. One way to increase productivity is to do the old time-and-motion studies made popular by industrial engineers based on archaic notions that, like machines, you could manage human actions to improve efficiencies. Results of these studies suggested removing distractions or other things that interfered with performance, such as not having the right equipment or spreading the work out over a large distance, while ignoring the more impactful effects of personal elements, such as stress and low morale.
In the midst of this pandemic, companies, institutions of all kinds, as well as independent contractors found it challenging to improve productivity, in part, due to these human factors. Thus, focusing on improving employee morale and stress. Reducing stress is hard with the increased demands of remote work and children attending school virtually, so let’s focus on improving employee morale as a means to improve productivity.
One of the most promising morale boosters, it turns out, is learning a new skill, which also contributes to improved productivity by enhancing an employee’s skill set. As a safe way to keep social distancing while still developing your skills and knowledge, digital classrooms, dedicated courses, and acknowledged certifications (e-learning) help professionals from all spheres evolve to become better, more productive employees. Let’s cover the various, most prevalent ways e-learning can improve productivity, no matter your industry.
How e-learning can improve productivity
Higher retention in competitive industries
No business is productive if their employees keep quitting jobs and the turnover rate is constantly increasing. High turnover results in increased costs through the costs of hiring and training replacements, as well as inefficiencies caused by downtime before the new employee is ready to assume their job and the learning curve, which means new employees are less efficient than the employee they replaced.
Retaining employees means that you get to develop your business together with them, even if it’s a small-scale operation, such as a three-person fitness brand. If you don’t give your employees enough training opportunities and invest in their knowledge and advancement, they will likely provide subpar results, work without passion, and most likely leave your company as soon as they get a better offer.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, brands that provide e-learning opportunities, making it easier for their teams to master new skills, see retention rates go up over time, and improve productivity as a result. Especially in competitive industries such as IT, where other employers try to snatch the best people from you – keeping the finest candidates with the prospect of continuous investment in their knowledge means growing your competitive advantage, too.
Improving employee engagement
Keeping morale high is particularly difficult if you work in a remote team since the stress of the pandemic paired with pure job difficulty leads to a disengaged organization. People experience burnout more often, deal with less work-life balance, and suffer from more anxiety than usual [source]. Now, although digital learning is far from a silver bullet, providing your teams the opportunity to expand their knowledge and master new skills shows you care about them, especially when you allow e-learning classes that don’t directly relate to their duties at work. For instance, allowing employees to enroll in a remote art or music class actually relieves stress, helping to improve productivity when they engage in work for you.
If you add team-based e-learning sessions, you can also enhance team cohesion. Plus, empowering mentorship in your organization, even with the help of digital learning, helps people feel more connected and work towards the same goals. Engaged employees are both more skilled and more productive, which will ultimately help you grow your business.
Mastering the latest skills in specialized fields
The medical industry grew extremely fast over the past year since the demand for highly skilled, educated medical workers is on the rise. To make sure people in specific medical sectors can keep working with patients whose lives might be at risk, e-learning is the perfect way to provide the latest medical knowledge without the need for crowded classrooms, putting them at even greater risk of getting sick.
E-learning helps medical workers get specialized certification and recertification required by associations to retain their license to practice without the expense and time required to attend classes in person. Of course, the medical field isn’t the only one where certification and periodic recertification are necessary to continue working.
In addition, the world around your business is constantly changing, requiring new skills and tactics to stay ahead of the competition. For instance, digital marketing is something new that most businesses require to stay in a game that increasingly involves a digital presence. Investing in your existing employees by paying for e-learning or even obtaining a certification in digital marketing makes sense as they already know your company and have expertise with other elements of your marketing.
Not only will your investment in upskilling employees pay off in terms of increasing productivity, but the investment also improves employee satisfaction and retention.
Better customization opportunities
Flexibility and customization are hallmarks of e-learning. Whether or not you have a healthcare institution, run a startup, or work on your own blog, you must ensure your employees learn about the specific topics of interest to your organization. Should you lead an entire team of people, as an employer, you need to provide employees the chance to grow as individuals and professionals, as mentioned earlier. In addition, many firms require all employees to undergo periodic training in areas related to HR, such as sexual harassment and bias training.
Employers must give their staff tailor-made training modules specifically designed to prepare them for their position, personal advancement, and of course, growth inside the company, too. You can customize courses to match your specific employee needs, to cover targeted topics, be it cybersecurity, advanced CPR, or communication skills for your sales staff.
Everyone has their own style of learning as well as different base knowledge. Hence, offering opportunities for e-learning where employees move at their own pace at whatever time best fits their needs is a great advantage offered through e-learning.
Elevated flexibility for obtaining new knowledge
If you work in the medical sector or you’re a teacher yourself, you know that you have so much on your plate that taking an hour to learn can seem impossible – if that hour is set in stone, that is. E-learning provides professionals the freedom and flexibility they need to adapt their curriculum to their schedule and learn at a pace that suits them and their current job.
With the many lucrative skills you can learn online, it’s much easier to retain a strong position within a company, but it also makes it easier for you to complete existing tasks faster. Instead of completely abandoning the idea of professional growth simply because you cannot make it to a class, e-learning ensures that you can discover courses, skills, and diverse methods of learning that give you much more time and flexibility.
Conclusion
Despite the pandemic and the variety of industry-specific issues you’ll encounter, investing in efforts to improve productivity contributes to overall employee satisfaction, engagement, and reduces employee turnover. No matter if you’re a freelancer, business owner, or anything in between, e-learning in every shape and form allows you to achieve all of that, and so much more. Use it to your advantage and let it improve productivity and your overall professional success!
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