Driving Course Completions

Hi Kennon,

Rewards can work but if your employees don't think the training is worthwhile in the first place, rewards just look like bribes. But bribes work too . Survey your employees ask them why they wait. Include in the survey individual evaluation of course content, presentation, value to the employee, job-applicable knowledge and amount of learning. You may find your answer lies in developing better courses that your employees see the value in taking. If not, here are a view more bribery tactics.

1. Just give them access to 1 course per month. So in the first month they can access 12 courses. The second month 11 courses, etc. They can work ahead but not behind. Then you'll just see the scramble during the last working day of the month :)
2. Adults like "student-type" recognition too. Make a wall chart and web page recognizing employee completion. Send out a monthly reminder of individual progress.
3. Small rewards like $5 gift cards for coffee, sandwich shop, gas card for every completion or every 3rd completion, depending upon your budget.

Cheers, Julie

I worked at one hospital where Junior doctors had to complete an elearning programme in 14 days of starting, if they did not take their certificate to HR they did not get paid.  

Not condoning this but they had 100% compliance surprisingly

I have advocated this many many times in corporate training. We have compensation plans for e.g. salespeople based on  many things, so why not have this in their first quarter's plan. Why should sales (almost always the culprits in my experience...) always be exempt from compliance and other corporate-mission training, just because they are "special".

Either training is required, or it is not. Set a strong learning culture and stay with it, preferably without such heavy-handed means, but if needs must - so be it.

In training, date triggered shaming messages! Probably wouldn't make a difference to them but you get to deride someone through eLearning, and that's the reason we all do it isn't it?

Alternatively, similar to other suggestions (and I have no idea how you would implement this but I'm sure that the smart people within this community could do it! with some sort of LMS & Javascript interaction) Have a gamified award style score/levels/trophies that pulls through each course, and awards points for both completion/score and time scales. Highest score at the end of the year wins .

Withhold pay is probably the easiest and most likely to produce results (may not be the most legal though, well in UK anyway).

Yep - did that too

Had an eLearning portal which tracked and displayed completions by sales department. It became quite a contest in the end - of course...nobody knows the learning achieved, but it was the start to a gradual culture-change...!

If eLearning completion is in the compensation plan to which they have signed up, I believe it is perfectly OK to withhold bonus and other payments.

Honestly, I am sure I have a few people that want to defy me and my training courses, but I generally find a friendly reminder email to those that haven't completed the course works well.  Usually, it seems people see the notification that something will be due on x date, have the best of intentions, and daily work gets in the way.  Often, when I sent a reminder, I receive replies thanking me.  If I have a few people really ignoring my requests, I cc their supervisor, and if all else fails, our site manager will get on their supervisor to get it done.

At the end of the day, the training we provide is required.  It's part of your job to complete it.  We work in a regulated industry and we could be severely fined (not to mention put our customer's lives in danger if we aren't properly trained) if people don't stay on top of it.  We have discussed providing a list of training that wasn't completed by the end of the year to the supervisor to use as part of the offending employee's annual review process.  I really don't want to have to do that.  

I'm hoping having a schedule of when everything will be due throughout the year available now will help people better prepare for not having to cram everything in in December. I started here mid-year last year, so I have tried to figure out where the gaps are and make changes for this year.  We are getting there!

I've single handedly had to promote our internal E-Learning site in order to increase traffic.

I've done this through several key steps -

• The introduction of a badge/rewards system
• Featured a 'Learner of the month' depending on number of courses completed or overall scores
• 'New Year New Learning' - Awarded to someone who has taken time from their usual subject area and completed a module on a different topic entirely. Used to represent and highlight that this is possible and encouraged
• Brought in some self designed videos to aid the engagement process, upon a new module being released I prepare a short 45-60 second video to inform everyone and drum up some attention
• We have a weekly internal newsletter the majority of the information above is used there and on the intranet

Recognition is one of the single most important factors of engagement.