According to a report in the Business and Ethics Journal, the most effective training techniques include accountability and rewards. While businesses are investing literally billions of dollars in robust training reward programs, in many cases they are failing to measure or set expectations for putting that training into practice. With our Learn and Earn Module, you can design effective training techniques capable of doing both—and at a huge savings compared to creating your own portal from scratch.
Measuring the Effectiveness of a Training Program
Businesses are constantly seeking out new ways to raise their bottom lines. Whether it’s cutting costs, improving their reputations in an industry or a community, or increasing sales, corporations go to great lengths to push their profits higher. This involves a good deal of testing, but all that money and effort goes to waste if you’re not measuring the right things.
A common mistake is creating a training program and gauging how many people have taken part. They might compare start and completion rates to see if a program is effective. Quizzes to test their knowledge could be another way to register whether a training program is doing its job. The problem is those kinds of tests don’t measure effectiveness in terms of the big picture. A program can be super fun or good at passing along facts and still have zero impact in the field.
It’s imperative to test whether your training program is able to teach your employees new information. It’s more important to check to see how they’re putting new information into motion. A Learn and Earn mentality takes care of both!
How Rewards Motivate Participation…and Results
In order for sales teams, distributors or customers to put training programs into practice, they have to complete them first. Make something easy and a small number of your audience will give it a whirl, but not enough to scratch the surface of your investment costs. In order to experience explosive ROI, people need to focus on completing the lessons.
Princess Cruise Line offers a valuable reward for travel agents who complete their extensive training program—a free cruise! Cunard and Carnival follow suit. This offers a double-benefit to travel agents who know that going on a cruise and posting about it online is one of the best ways to advertise your travel business. It’s a reward with real motivational power.
At Incentive Solutions, we help you pick the rewards that best work for your target market. Debit cards, online reward cards, points to use in online malls to buy real products at real prices. One of our account representatives can help you determine the best reward plan for you, but it’s important there’s enough of a reward to complete the process.
The Incentive Research Fund ranks effective rewards across several industries. By and large, electronics, name-brand apparel and debit cards were among the most enticing rewards. All of these are available through Incentive Solutions rewards programs.
Obviously, having an easy to access, mobile-ready, fun and engaging training program helps too. The Learn and Earn system allows you to customize modules, include multimedia files and segment opportunities by individual, team and type of participant. We’ve worked out the kinks of organizing an efficient training program and provide the tools your participants need to take it to the end. The question is, how can you use Learn and Earn to put that knowledge into motion?
The Impact of Accountability on Training Transfer
Princess Cruise Line and Norwegian Cruise Line have similar training programs. They’re lengthy, robust and designed to give even the newest agents the competence to go out and get the job done. The difference? The rewards system. Princess hands out cruises to everyone who completes their training module. Norwegian requires they put the training into action. Agents earn a new cruise only after they’ve completed the training and booked five cabins aboard a voyage that’s seven nights or longer.
Disney has a similar setup. Complete their College of Knowledge and you open the door to freebies and deep discounts, but first, you have to earn $5,000 in commission from selling their products.
Do they offer other benefits throughout the training process? Yes. From special certificates to discounts and recognition as a brand expert, training programs that gradually up the ante are effective at keeping participants engaged despite having a roadblock between training completion and the big payout. Outside the travel world, these types of reward and accountability programs are working as well.
Effective Training Techniques with Incentive Solutions
What would an effective reward and accountability program look for your business?
Contact an Incentive Solutions account representative today to design effective training techniques for your business, and watch your efforts return big results.
