How to Create a Stress-Free Online Training Environment
The world is a busy place, and the learners you need to complete your training courses often face pressures from a range of different directions. They have the pressures of their job and the expectations they have to meet, as well as pressures outside of work. The last thing they need is added stress to complete training.
Training is important, however. In fact, it is essential for various crucial business reasons, including maintaining standards of service, ensuring ongoing competitiveness, and meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
How do you provide training that doesn’t increase stress levels? Taking an empathetic approach is a good first step. An empathetic approach will not only reduce learner stress levels related to training activities, but it will also improve the quality of your e-learning courses and the outcomes they achieve.
The following tips will also help you create a stress-free online training environment.
Clarify Expectations
One source of stress for employees is unclear expectations. This applies to all aspects of their work, including training. You won’t be able to solve this issue completely, but you can help with the training element by clarifying what you expect the learner to do and by when.
The expectations need to be in line with business requirements, but it is also important they are realistic. Setting realistic expectations also helps you get better buy-in and engagement from learners.
Segment Your Training
Giving learners too much training on too broad a topic all at the same time is likely to increase their stress levels, particularly when all the training and content becomes overwhelming. Segmenting your training is the solution.
This includes segmenting the topics, so you split the training up into different courses rather than covering everything in one massive course. You can also segment the content within each course where it makes sense to do so. This is often referred to as microlearning which is a training strategy that involves presenting content to learners in bite-sized chunks.
Allow Self-Directed Learning
Empowering learners and giving them responsibility for their own training and development can increase engagement levels and reduce the stress that can sometimes accompany training requirements.
Ways you can allow self-directed learning include developing personalised training content and implementing a just-in-time training strategy. The former – personalised training content – ensures learners can focus their time and energy on content areas and topics where they are weakest and need the most support.
Just-in-time training involves creating training courses that have no completion deadline. Instead of learners being required to finish the training by a specified date, they can complete it whenever they want to. This is often when they need the information and knowledge the most.
Maximise Flexibility
Being as flexible as possible will also help create a stress-free environment for learners. For example, ensuring your e-learning courses work on any device or screen means learners have the flexibility to not only complete the training where it is most suitable, but also when.
Provide Support
One way that learners can get stressed when completing online training is when they don’t understand what is being taught and have no avenue for getting clarity or further help. In this situation, the learner might go over the content again and again, and they might even look for additional sources of information.
The best approach is to make it clear to learners how they can get help whenever they need it.
Add Social Elements
Online training is often an isolated experience where learners work through the content and various exercises on their own. This works well for some learners but for others, the experience can be isolating and stressful. One way to alleviate these issues is to add social elements to your online training.
This could take the form of group activities, achievement-sharing features, or chat features where learners can interact with their peers and course instructors.
Make It Easy to Monitor Progress
Learners can become stressed with the learning process when they don’t know where they stand. This can be resolved by making it clear to learners how much they have completed, how much is still left to do, and how well they are doing. This should be done within an e-learning course using a progress bar or similar tool. You can also implement similar progress information features that cover all aspects of a learner’s training.
Eliminate Clutter
Clutter in an e-learning course is distracting, it makes the content more difficult to digest and understand, and it can take up time to consume – time the learner probably doesn’t have to spare. All this can lead to increased levels of stress.
Eliminating clutter is the solution. This includes removing unnecessary images, videos, and design features, as well as keeping written text firmly on-topic.
Ask for Feedback
Even with the best of intentions, it is not always possible to get it right every time. Therefore, it is beneficial to ask learners for feedback on what they thought of the e-learning course. This feedback will help you improve the course in a range of different areas, including ensuring the course isn’t causing the learner unnecessary stress.
A Stress-Free Training Environment Produces Good Outcomes
Providing a stress-free training environment is as beneficial for the business and your training strategy as it is for individual learners. When employees can learn without stress or tension, they can concentrate more fully on the topic and get a deeper and more longer-lasting understanding.