Is your team adding eLearning courses to its training and development programs? Many organizations are adding eLearning for onboarding, compliance and sales training, for example. Use of custom eLearning can reduce seat times and increase flexibility and learner success overall.

However, it is also important to prepare your management team to facilitate eLearning. Management buy-in is a critical part of the process to lay the groundwork for success, both in terms of process implementation and the effectiveness of your learning solution in enhancing employee performance.

Here are some important steps to take when adding new eLearning courses, or simply updating content.

Five Ways to Prepare for Successful eLearning

• Schedule time for learning. Implementation of new training courses can be frustrating and even stressful for employees if they feel that they don’t have time to spend on it. Busy managers will feel even less inclined to review the courses if they don’t have time. Promote learning buy-in and increase motivation by setting aside some dedicated time in the schedule for management to review the courses, and for employees to learn.
• User-test all assets. The new additions to your learning management system (LMS) and any additional free standing digital courses and materials should all be compatible with the tools available to your team. No one should have functionality issues with playback of videos, be unable to click buttons or have trouble with navigation or viewing any part of the course. Ensure your LMS is up to date and that it’s compatible with mobile devices — including laptops, tablets and even phones — and browsers employees might use to participate in the courses. When possible, bring management in at the user-testing phase before rollout to give them an opportunity to preview the course and provide feedback. Doing so will automatically increase buy-in from your management team.
• Invest in a Train-the-Trainer course. Your management team will thank you for providing the additional preparation and support. Learning to help facilitate management might include an overview of the material, prep on how to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), a review of any new technology used, downloadable resources with talking points and even training on any leadership skills they might need.

• Encourage management to proactively ask for and accept feedback. Is your management team ready to take feedback about the courses? No one wants to be caught off guard by questions they aren’t ready to answer when getting feedback about a new process. Instead, proactively put a system in place to encourage feedback from learners. Let your management team know that the value of their gathering this information is to collect and document issues, questions and even problems with the intention of improving the course over time.
• Upskill your team on how to analyze user data. The beauty of eLearning is, in part, the ease with which you can collect user data and information to measure the success (or failure) of the course. When your management team has the ability to measure the results of the learning courses or pull information that will help them with management of the team, they will be more likely to buy-in to the new digital learning system. Give them a basic level of access and show them how to use it to their benefit.

Moving Forward

There are simple ways to ensure that management is prepared and ready to facilitate learning, including custom eLearning courses to train employees. The value of adding a little prep work is in the successful return on investment (ROI) when managers are empowered to better support and lead employees.