In today's dynamic job market, the UK continues to face an intriguing challenge: a relentless pursuit by businesses to find exceptional talent that perfectly fits their needs. Employee retention can be critical to this; losing brilliant and accomplished team members could prove to be a monumental setback. These individuals possess a unique blend of talent and expertise that sets them apart, making their loss an irreplaceable void. In this context, employee retention has emerged as a strategy, captivating the attention of forward-thinking companies.
The battle lines are drawn, and businesses understand that their success and competitive edge lie in keeping these top-tier performers engaged, motivated, and loyal.
One of the best ways to invest in your employees is by giving them training so they can progress their careers with you, it is a great win-win for both parties. But, are you presenting your training in a way that employees can better understand, retain and engaged with the information? There are many different modalities in how people learn, If your employees understand that you are creating their training just for them, in the modality that they learn best within, they will get the message loud and clear that you trying your best to invest in their future positively. Although there are lots of employee retention strategies out there this is a great one that flies under the radar that you can add to your retention stack!
If employees find it easier to learn the information they feel less anxiety when it comes to a training session. Also, they will retain more information increasing their skill level giving them the ability to advance their career. We all want the feeling we are moving forward in life, it is important to our motivation as a person and affects our career choices.
Styles
Information and learning styles come in many different forms, according to a blog fromLightbulbMoment.com, there are 3 different ways people learn. Verbal learners are people who learn by listening and this equates to about 30% of the general population, they benefit from things like class lectures or group discussions. Experiential learners are only about 5% of the population, these people learn by doing and touching; things like clinical work or role-playing exercises.
Although there are other ways people learn, the remaining 65% of the population are visual learners. They need to see what they are learning and whilst they have difficulty following verbal lectures they perform well at written assignments, and can often remember information quite easily. So, with the increase of technology that frequently influences people with imagery, this is increasingly the dominant way people connect and learn from each other.
In most cases businesses will be made up of Verbal and Visual learners, so you will really need to adapt to both. People who learn by listening can benefit from visual learning too, as imagery is often shown with the text, which will benefit both learners.
It is so important to know what you’re teaching style is as you may need to adapt it to benefit how other people will learn. Whether you are a business owner or employee. Not only will this reduce your learning curve but also allow you to communicate the same concepts to people confidently.
VARK Learning Styles
In 1992 a study by Neil D. Fleming and Coleen E. Mills describe four modalities of student learning “VARK” is used to described these. The different learning styles are visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic. These were identified after thousands of hours of classroom observation. More information on VARK here
Examples of how you can accommodate different learning styles effectively
Start by Asking How They Learn Best:
You need to understand how your staff are going to retain information, otherwise, they are going to struggle with taking information in and retaining it, so it is crucial you support their needs as much as possible. Talking to them about it shows your employees that you are fine-tuning things to them personally.
Understand the Difference Between learning styles:
As a business owner or manager, it would be useful to know the percentages of different learners working for you so you can accommodate them. You will need to learn the difference between them and how you can support individuals or groups with the same learning styles.
Be Flexible and Develop Step-by-Step Processes:
You need to be flexible and willing to work with people in different ways, making time in your schedule to create multiple styles so everyone can understand. You also need to accommodate how people within your business learn, which could mean implementing a step by step process to make it easier. This may be time-consuming but it will give good results in the long run.
Make Sure Meetings Serve Both Types:
If the majority of your learners are verbal and visual, create information that will suit both in the meeting, whether that be talking to your employees, using handouts or conducting visual presentations all of which could work well for both.
Develop Individual Plans:
If there is a particular member of staff struggling with the plans you have put in place, why not develop individual plans that you can both agree on.
Although it can be hard for a business to accommodate multiple learning styles, by making sure any information you relay has content that will suit both will make all the difference.
In order to use learning styles to boost your business, you need to completely understand how the different styles work and how individual learners retain information. Even though technology is taking over and creating more visual ways of working, you will always need text and content to go with imagery. Both imagery and text will always work hand in hand, so verbal and visual learners should too.