Businesses spend billions on learning and development (L&D) every year with the hope that it will increase employee performance, but if team workflows aren’t streamlined, these efforts might not yield the desired results. Overly long or drawn-out workflows can leave trainees more muddled than when they walked in. There are real-time and resource limitations that need to be considered.

Streamlining team workflows is vital. To do it, L&D leaders need to leverage technologies and strategies that help maximize the time they have while still ensuring the highest quality output. It’s an ambitious goal but the right interventions make it possible.

Best Practices to Boost L&D Team Productivity

Improving L&D team productivity often starts with the simplest adjustments. Here are some best practices that L&D leaders can use to optimize their teams:

• Take document management seriously: Most L&D programs will involve a fair amount of documentation, especially as outcomes are tested and tracked. Proper document management can ensure tasks like version control and accessibility are streamlined, freeing teams to focus on training rather than administrative work. Proper software further automates repetitive processes, reducing manual effort.
• Streamline communication: Having centralized platforms for communication and document storage can save L&D teams a huge amount of hassle. Even just switching to cloud-based document management especially when integrated with your CRM can ensure that everyone on a team has access to important reports, for example, and thus can get on with work quicker or collaborate on notes more easily.

• Clear up goals and priorities: The most productive teams are the ones that are the most focused. Having a clear set of goals and priorities brings everyone on an L&D team into alignment and ensures that all efforts are focused on a shared purpose, rather than lost to distractions.

• Create a roadmap: Goals mean little without a roadmap on how to get there, especially in a training context. If the goal, for example, is to train employees to have better document management skills, then the roadmap needs to outline exactly how this will be done, and what it will involve time and resource-wise. Doing so also allows L&D teams to catch potential inefficiencies early on.
• Track progress: While excess scrutiny can be its own problem, tracking employee progress is an important part of boosting productivity. The satisfaction for an L&D team, seeing the progress they’ve made with a training program, can incentivize them to push even further with their work.

Steps to Enhance the Quality of Training Programs

The quality of a training program has a major impact on employee performance afterward and in turn, company performance.

Here are a few key steps that L&D leaders can take to enhance the quality of their programs:

• Assess the gaps: What are the current gaps in employee training, especially as it relates to the organization’s needs? Answering this question can direct far more effective training programs simply because it makes the outcome more valuable. Training without a clear purpose adds little value. Training programs that address gaps in an organization are the ones that truly make a difference.

• Bring in the real world: There are countless ways to approach training transference but no matter what theory you ascribe to, bringing in real-world simulations or examples is always important. Not only does it contextualize learning, but it also increases trainees’ understanding of how they could realistically apply what they’re doing in the program to their day-to-day jobs.

• Prioritize active learning: As anyone who has sat through a long lecture knows, simply listening to someone talk about what you should do or know rarely changes behavior. Active learning, such as participating in a drill or real-world scenario, forces trainees to take what they’ve heard and apply it, thus raising the likelihood of them retaining and using that knowledge after the program.

• Develop feedback loops: The best guides for L&D teams will always be the employees they’re trying to help. Creating feedback loops that allow trainees to reflect on their experience and rate its efficacy can help improve the quality of the next program and the next one and the next.

Strategies to Improve Efficiency and Maintain Quality in Training

These simple strategies are a reminder that quality and efficiency don’t need to be mutually exclusive goals for L&D teams:

• Create reusable materials in terms of worksheets, checklists, etc. that standardize best practices and ensure high-quality output for every program

• Focus on the outcome so that all training efforts are distributed efficiently.

• Embrace micro-learning by breaking training into smaller chunks that make better use of L&D teams’ and trainee’s time.

• Incorporate self-learning so that training isn’t always reliant on the L&D team being in the room with employees. Allowing trainees to step away enhances their learning experience and makes things more efficient.

• Make it Social and collaborative by creating opportunities for group discussions, knowledge sharing, etc. as this takes the pressure off one-on-one instruction while also boosting engagement.

• Implement blended learning with a flexibility that allows trainees to get more out of the program in their busy schedules and makes things easier on L&D teams trying to fit around those schedules.

Conclusion

L&D teams perform some of the most important work in an organization and have to do so under considerable pressure. Streamlining team workflows and training programs can make that work far more efficient and yield better results long term. It simply demands L&D leaders who are willing to enact smarter strategies and technologies along the way.