Most companies have some sort of training program for their employees. Whether it is a handbook, training sessions, or a fully automated LMS (Learning Management Software) program, your goal is to make sure your employees understand your company, brand, products and/or services, and general procedures.

What most companies don’t realize is that you can integrate your training program with your employee recognition program. By rewarding employees through recognition and rewards for completing training modules, you grow both programs and encourage more employee engagement.

Here are some of the ways integrating training into your recognition program will benefit your company and its culture.

Increased Interaction with the Program

You can add your training materials directly to your recognition program or even integrate it with your LMS. When you pair recognition with your training initiatives your participants will be able to track their progress all within a website they are already used to visiting. They can view training modules, look at their rewards, and nominate others all within the same place. For users who have so many logins to remember, or who aren’t at desks all day, having one place to go to is a big benefit.

Reward Training on Products/Services

When you incorporate training into your recognition program, you can implement rewarding systems alongside the videos, documents, and quizzes that make up the education piece. From badges to achievement awards, with or without a monetary value, any kind of reward can help boost participation in your training program. The recognition turns into a sort of incentive. Then, when participation increases (as it does when employees are incentivized), your employees will know more about your product and/or services.

This can be particularly helpful across departments, or branches of the organization. The more your employees know about the company and other processes besides their own, the better they will be able to do their job. It all starts with the training, which can get a boost by adding a fun element (such as recognition) to the mix.

Ethics and Safety

If your company is dedicated to keeping the workplace a friendly and safe place to work, having ethics and safety training is a great tool. When an employee completes a quiz with all right answers, they deserve recognition. This can be a monetary or non-monetary prize. An achievement badge or a note of appreciation from the company could be enough to reward an employee who successfully completes the ethics training. In addition to making the company a safer place to work, it will also minimize the risk the company has if safety or harassment issues arise.

Social Interaction on Social Stream

When your users complete a training module, you can have award notifications show up on the social stream of recognition messages. If your recognition program allows it, your employees can like and comment on messages. In this situation, your employees would see that John Smith completed the Safety Training module with a 100% on the quiz. That employee can like or comment to congratulate John Smith on finishing the module. Then, if enough people are completing the module, the employee may feel a bit of peer pressure to complete it for his or herself. The cycle will continue, thus increasing engagement.

Integrate with LMS

All the aspects of integrating your training program with your recognition program would work far more smoothly if your company integrated their LMS program with the recognition solution. This will automate the process and allow for your company to customize the training modules. It would save you time managing the program, freeing up the ability to focus on other important tasks.