Corporate training, or custom learning, when aligned to the company’s vision, strategic goals, and brand helps the company reap several benefits when done the right way.

Why Aligning Training To Company Vision And Brand Is Beneficial To You

Every company seeks training programs to transform its employees in terms of knowledge, skills, and even, attitudes. Indeed, a company can reap several advantages in the long run when it aligns its corporate training to the company vision, brand, and strategic goals.

Looking For An Extra Mile?

A training program is usually aimed at increasing the employees’ knowledge and skill levels, which in turn results in increased productivity. However, you soon realize that this is only a short-term benefit. The productivity increase soon tapers off, employee morale decreases, and attrition levels increase. You start wishing for your engagement and training programs to go an extra mile…to go beyond imparting knowledge and skills, and to influence your employees’ attitudes and behaviors.

A training program that not just informs and teaches, but also inspires, motivates, and builds a relationship between your employee and your company! Seems like a dream? Well, it can be your reality…just read on to learn how!

What’s The Bigger Picture?

When you align your custom learning with your company’s vision, brand, and strategic goals effectively, you actively engage your employees and help them “work for you” rather than “work with you”.

For a company, the brand represents the company’s core beliefs, values, and practices that it promises to uphold. Great care is taken to create a company brand. Employees play a vital role in maintaining the company brand.

Employees must imbibe the brand values and corporate beliefs in their everyday work routine. Management must also reinforce their commitment to the brand values through their actions. Aligning training to strategic goals is one example of such an action.

When you are planning to bring about a change within the organization, for example, introducing a new software, you can deploy a training to help the employees adapt to the change faster. Usually, change is met with resistance of the employees who fear they may lose their jobs or become irrelevant to the company. Providing a training will not only ensure a smooth transition but also endear the company to its employees, who will realize that the management is committed to safeguarding its employees’ interests.

Use of the company’s branding colors on the training materials can help the employees build an association with the company. Video messages from the CEO welcoming the learners or a video message from the CTO highlighting how the adoption of a new technology can help the company become a market leader add credibility to the training.

Best Practices

You can align your custom learning to your branding and vision by following some best practices. These are enumerated next:

1. Identify What Your Most Important Objectives Are

Break them down into the specific training steps you need to achieve the objectives.

2. Discuss With Learning Strategists

The learning strategists can provide insights on the optimal training program appropriate for your company. However, it is important that you agree with how training program is aligned with your corporate strategy.

3. Prioritize Training Programs

Those that have a greater impact on brand and strategic goals need to be deployed at the earliest.

4. Provide Relevant And Appropriate Training Programs

Training aimed at employees should help them adapt their behavior to the brand. Provide rewards that encourage employees to align their attitudes to the company brand. Issuing a certificate at the end of a training program is one example.

5. Project The Company Image Onto The Learners

This can be done by adding various elements such as a mascot or a mentor as well as video messages from top management or experts. In addition, handy job aids can be added to the learning experience and connect with the learners.

6. Measure Effectiveness And Reassess Training

If you do not evaluate the impact and effectiveness of your training program against your strategic goals, you may end up wasting your employees’ time. Develop clear and measurable metrics to evaluate employees before and after the training program.

5 Key Benefits Of Aligning Training To Company Vision

Here’s a snap-shot of the 5 key benefits that can be accrued by aligning your custom learning to your strategic goals:

1. Increase In Productivity

Reach the desired productivity level sooner than expected and sustaining the growth. An example from one of our customers’ success story is employees resolving a number of technical problems and proactively acting to prevent recurrence.

2. More Return On Investment In Training

Short-term gains in terms of increased knowledge and better skills of resources to long-term gains by way of transformation in employees’ attitudes. This ensures that employees are more loyal, committed, hard-working, and involved in their work thereby reducing attrition.

3. Decrease In Errors/Cost/Conflicts

Adopt new processes faster and achieve more savings. An example of this is that employees make fewer mistakes; get rewarded by pay hikes, bonuses on a profit-sharing basis and ensure they are more motivated and a happy workforce.

4. A Decrease In The Number Of People Required For The Job While Increasing Their Competencies

Organizations achieve balance by improving on resources utilized. Further, employees can perform new roles. An example of this is that employees are free to take on more responsibilities as well as develop their competencies and skills.

5. Increase In Effectiveness Of Training

Metrics and data can be used to evaluate how effective training is in achieving strategic goals. Example of this is that employees find training content relevant and transfer their learnings to the job effectively.

What Next?

It is not enough to be in awe of the long-term benefits of custom learning. Ensuring that your custom learning delivers these benefits, requires careful deliberations and possibly discussions with ID Strategists. Consider some questions:

• How to reap the long-term benefits of custom learning, but don’t know how?
• How can you be assured that your training is aligned with your company’s goals?
• How to ensure your new hires remain loyal to your company?
• What if you wanted to measure how much your custom learning contributes to your company reaching its set goals?

At Tesseract Learning, our ID Strategists have been working with Learning and Development Managers and SMEs for our global customers in developing optimal Custom Learning solutions. To know more, please get in touch with me at suresh@tesseractlearning.com.