Training Incentives to Improve Training Participation

Crafting an appealing online training incentives program is an excellent way to motivate distributed workforces and members of your extended enterprise. Effectively training your contractors, resellers, partners, and employees is one proven way to reinforce key business objectives and improve your bottom line. The convenience and flexibility of Learning Management Systems (LMS) certainly helps, but however, partners need quantifiable reasons to participate.

It’s All About Motivation

In our increasingly busy world, it can be challenging to get people to actually show up to training, let alone retain the information. Although they may know training will help, there’s little motivation to attend because of factors such as time or value. So, how do you get people to be present and engaged? Incorporate training incentives to give people the extra encouragement they need to participate and make training a priority. These exciting rewards add immense value to learning and development, and can result in high-performing channel partners, improved customer service, and increased sales. Organizations often notice an immediate increase in eLearning participation and engagement because people enjoy being rewarded.

Training Incentives to Improve Participation

It is also important to ensure that training incentives consist of rewards people actually want, not what you think they want. Otherwise, your target audience may lose interest in the training opportunity and see little value in completion. Essentially, you must be strategic in developing training incentives that show partner appreciation and provide a compelling reason to excel. Here are some awesome training incentives to improve participation:

1. Gift Cards

A popular way to improve training participation is by awarding partners with gift cards for completing online courses. According to an Incentive Magazine 2008 survey, gift cards were shown to be superior over cash because they are more memorable. They serve as a reminder of achievement and are perceived as a true gift, rather than compensation for performance. It is tempting to spend cash on necessities like bills, but gift cards allow for guilt-free spending on special items. As businesses move to non-cash training incentives, gift cards prove to be a strong motivator because people enjoy using them.

2. Gamified Points Program

Rewarding your partners with points rather than cash has become the go-to strategy in many training incentive programs. After the successful completion of each training, participants earn points to either redeem immediately or use in the future. They like this option because of the flexibility in choosing their reward, which empowers them and boosts morale. You can offer cool incentives like travel, merchandise, and electronics that your partners will love and work hard to earn.

3. Paid Time Off

Are you training customer service reps, sales teams or other employees? Another proven method to win your workforce over is through paid time off (PTO). Data from Glassdoor’s Q3 2015 Employment Confidence Survey revealed that workers are willing to sacrifice stock options or a higher salary in return for more time off. This means time away from work, whether an hour or a day, is essential! Show employees you care about their education and learning, but also understand the need for work-life balance. Refreshed, focused, and dedicated people are the foundation of a successful business.Therefore, rewarding them with personal time is a win – win! Using add-on vacation hours as a way to encourage employees to take advantage of online training and can produce positive results in more ways than one.

Create a training incentives program that strongly encourages your workforce to get involved and rewarded for their effort. It is always important to start with what your partners and employees want out of a program.  This way, you'll build a training incentives program they will actually use. When a better trained and informed workforce begins to emerge, you’ll be glad you took this important step in improving your company’s learning and development strategy.

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