How to Improve Employee Retention with eLearning

Are you struggling to keep a consistent team? Or finding skills shortages amongst staff as key talent leaves?

Employee retention is an inevitable issue, however having a strategy for retaining your top talent can ensure your very best employees feel valued enough to stay.

As the world of work shifts further towards remote and virtual environments, businesses need to offer flexibility to try and compete.

Here's how eLearning can play a vital role in improving retention through upskilling your workforce in a way that's suitable to them.

Understanding the Impact of Employee Retention

Losing an employee can have a much bigger impact than you might think. Of course, losing a valued member of your team is never easy — but some surprising consequences can impact your business quite quickly.

First, let's take a look at why employee retention is so important. Great employees can offer a company a lot of value. Giving these employees reasons to stay, through a strong retention strategy, pays off in many different ways. First, employees who feel valued and invested are likely to be happier. This boost in team morale will keep turnover rates low and reduce your recruitment and training costs. High morale is also likely to increase productivity, improving your business metrics and leading to more profit.

On the other hand, the negative impacts of losing employees are significant too. High turnover rates cost companies in terms of recruiting and training new staff. There's also significant time and knowledge loss when an employee leaves, meaning remaining staff often have to focus on trying to replace or make up for their loss. Teams lose cohesion, and overall morale drops and this can even go as far as negatively impacting customer outcomes.

The Role of eLearning in Employee Retention

You know the importance of retention, but what's the best way to go about keeping your best talent? Investing in your employees through upskilling is one of the best ways to ensure they stick around. While there are plenty of methods to do this, eLearning offers the most flexible and scalable way to train your workforce and empower them to take ownership of their learning.

One of the biggest advantages of eLearning is how flexible it is. Your employees can enroll in highly personalized online training programs designed specifically with their skill gaps in mind. At Skill Dynamics, we use a Skill Gap Assessment as part of our eLearning platform. This ensures that learners can discover their areas of development, and then address them with the full personalized learning plan that we provide.

Our eLearning courses are also self-paced, meaning that your employees can upskill at a pace that fits around their regular working life. Too much pressure from having to complete a conventional training course while also staying productive at work could have a negative impact. eLearning avoids this by letting people learn and grow at their own pace.

Designing Effective eLearning Programs for Retention

Engaging with eLearning as a company is a great first step, but how do you make sure as a business leader that it's giving your employees exactly what you need? This is where strategy and program design come in. You need to work with a platform that aligns the eLearning content with your organizational goals and employee development needs. This is how you ensure the training is relevant and likely to improve employee retention.

Keeping your employees engaged in their training is vital, so make sure the platform you choose makes use of things like multimedia, gamification, and real-world scenarios and simulations to provide the best learning experience for your teams.

We utilize all of these techniques, along with grounding our eLearning offerings in instructional design principles. We want to give your employees the best outcome so that they can learn in a manner that benefits their daily work lives but also their entire careers.

Addressing Employee Needs and Preferences

No two employees are the same, so any training you do needs to reflect their individual needs and preferences. This means considering different job roles, skill levels, and even learning styles to craft an eLearning solution that fits everyone.

This is where AI powered learning plans stand out compared to other training methods. Its flexibility and adaptability mean you can roll out personalized training at scale. We offer specific role-based training for over 1,000 role and level combinations within your procurement and supply chain teams to make sure each course is targeted at the right people.

You can tailor your training content even further by relying on employee feedback to improve over time. Feedback collected through surveys, focus groups, or performance assessments can all be combined to make sure each iteration of your training offers more to your employees than the last.

Measuring the Impact of eLearning on Retention

Investing in employee retention — particularly through training — is a brilliant way to develop trust and loyalty among your employees. However, we're sure that some people may need to see some proof. Maybe you need to get buy-in from senior leaders or the board. This is one area where measuring the impact of training on retention becomes important.

A varied approach to measurement often works best, where you look at how effective the training is in a couple of different ways. Key metrics you may want to look at could include:

• Course completion rates
• Employee feedback surveys
• Knowledge application metrics
• Competency improvement

By gathering a mix of qualitative and quantitative information you'll be better able to show the whole story of how effective your program is. Quantitative results will show exactly how your workers are improving and the direct impact it has on business metrics, but qualitative results will show employee sentiment. This feedback is vital to find out things like job satisfaction or key challenges — both have a big impact on employee retention.

Leveraging eLearning for Talent Development and Succession Planning

People hate feeling stuck, so providing a clear progression path is one way you can maximize your employee retention. eLearning has an important role to play in how you develop and retain top performers.

If you track your training's performance metrics as we discussed above, you'll be able to quickly identify those employees that could develop into future leaders. Once identified, you can work on introducing aspects of leadership or strategy training into their eLearning modules — deepening your succession planning and improving organizational resilience by having a pool of leadership talent available.

Empowering Employee Growth and Retention Through eLearning

Employee retention is an area that's going to continue to become more important as the world of work evolves. Businesses are already dealing with a competitive jobs market, and shifting employee sentiments in a post-Covid world. People now, more than ever, want to feel like their employer is actively investing in them and their future.

eLearning offers the most tailored way to do this. It can improve retention by offering bespoke training courses fit for each individual, and help foster a culture of continuous learning and development throughout your organization.

Use eLearning to empower employee growth, enhance job satisfaction, and strengthen your organizational resilience by developing your existing talent to rise through the ranks.

To learn more about how we can help, why not take a look through our eLearning course catalogs? Let us share our expertise to help grow your business and improve your employee retention today.