Micro-Learning: The Key To Employee Engagement?

It is important to understand having a growth mindset of employees and engaging in lifelong learning. The essential habits to foster at a cultural level should be maximized to increase customer experience. Having the chance to develop personally is one of the top five things that employees of all age groups value most in life and we also know that learning is a key driver of workplace happiness and employee engagement. It shows that employees want the opportunity to keep on learning and challenging themselves, especially when it means they can learn new skills that benefit them personally and professionally. Learning has finally become accepted as an integral part of working life and this is true across all educational backgrounds.

Employees also have expectations from employers that they also need to allow for time off work to facilitate learning. One-in-five employees also believed that professional learning should only take place during working hours which is acceptable for compliance-based training, but for improving skills like time management, dealing with stress, etc that’s just not viable. For employers to free up time and deliver in line with these high expectations requires a shift away from traditional classroom study to online methods. More importantly, it requires a change in thinking away from expecting employees to complete online courses in one sitting. Even the most engaged learners can only dedicate five or 10 minutes a day at best.

Researchers have shown when information is delivered in small particles it is much easier to retain the learning process which helps to make it more efficient. This is because learners can work at their own pace and most importantly they are in the right ‘zone’ to learn. Typically, micro-learning addresses only one or two learning objectives, but psychologists have discovered that it generates on average four to five learned takeaways. For microlearning to be very successful it needs a mindset shift at the organisational level.

To fix that into an organization’s culture, it is necessary to stop ticking boxes or measuring completion rates and instead look at the wider ‘diversity of learning’ that’s happening. People should take responsibility for their own self-development and just provide resources and encouragement. If employees finish a part of a course on a topic, they will have benefitted and got what they needed at that time. Irrespective of whether they have received a certificate or not, they have learned something new that they can apply in their working or professional life.