When you hear someone say “employee training manual,” what pictures spring to mind? Most likely, you see a small paper book or a pamphlet. This style continues to be in practice, but such manuals are typically text-heavy, and perusing them is sometimes a tedious and time-consuming experience. It’d be challenging to find a worker that appreciates studying this guidebook.
Luckily, now there are other alternatives. Technology has altered the way we create and present training materials. Employees may find modern digital guides visually appealing, concise, practical, and engaging. Instead of forcing your employees to read a tedious fire safety operational manual, you may design an online and interactive employee training manual that they like.
We’ve compiled some crucial aspects to consider and procedures to follow to build an employee training manual that your staff will enjoy in this article.
Table of Contents
What is the definition of an employee training manual?
An employee training manual contains guidelines for improving the quality of an activity, procedure, or function. Its ultimate purpose is to give employees the resources and knowledge required to succeed in their positions.
An employee training manual might be of two types:
Employee handbook
An employee training manual is a guidebook that new employees receive on the first day on the job. It contains the workplace laws and regulations and key facts about the firm, such as its purpose, principles, and ethos. A handbook’s primary function is to create clear expectations for employees while clarifying legal obligations and responsibilities. Another critical component of a guidebook like this is educating new employees about the workplace culture and how they would fit in.
Self-paced guide
Such training guides contain information particular to the position. They allow employees to properly carry out their responsibilities and assist them if they become stuck along the road. As a result, a lab assistant’s training handbook will be very different from a customer service engineer’s.
There could also be task- or project-specific instructions, such as a reference to writing notes or a guide to someone using Google Analytics.
What’s the importance of an employee training manual?
An employee training manual is an inexhaustible supply of information for your firm. Your employees will utilize manuals year after year, and you can expect the following benefits:
New hires are onboarded more quickly
New workers quickly acquire information, skills, and habits and become productive members of the firm by knowing what to do and having all the essential instructions.
Increased employee productivity
Employees can learn and improve their skills with the help of training manuals. They make sure that person does not overlook essential instructions. People gradually attain their objectives.
Employee retention is higher
Employees become dissatisfied and disengaged when they experience problems at work, are reluctant to ask for assistance, and have no appropriate support services to engage with. Employees may identify solutions and solve challenges independently with the knowledge they need via online course platforms, increasing their satisfaction.
Reduction in Employee workload
Providing the required instructions to employees eliminates the need for the management and HR experts to address the same concerns repeatedly. They can utilize this time to focus on more vital duties, such as establishing business plans or hiring new employees.
Fewer costly errors
Rules violations might cost you a lot of money. Your company will not obtain needed funds if a bill is not submitted correctly, for example. You may mitigate this problem by having all of your documents in order.
A step-by-step guide to designing the perfect employee training manual
Creating an employee training manual is not as difficult as it may appear. However, it has numerous steps, just like any other process. To make the procedure more manageable for you, we’ve grouped the steps together. Just follow these instructions, and you’ll be fine.
Know what you’re up against
It will help if you start by doing a training audit. Examine your workplace for duties and processes that you may streamline, determine whether you can optimize them by recording the methods, and choose the type of employee training manual that would be most useful in each scenario.
Establish the manual’s structure
Now that you understand which training booklets you’ll need to meet your company’s needs, it’s time to figure out how to offer them to your staff. Below are a few popular choices:
- Guidebooks or pamphlets printed on paper
- Manuals in PDF or Word
- Articles
- Online course platforms
- Tutorial videos
- Interactive short modules
Consider the type of topic you wish to discuss while selecting a format. For example, a screencast is a way to go if you want to show how to utilize the software. You may produce a PDF manual or a digital course on online course platforms if you’re going to teach your new staff about corporate regulations and processes.
Make the material
Printing booklets is a simple process. Actually, all you need is a software tool and then a printer. However, this simplicity comes at a cost: reading such things is tedious and ineffective in knowledge retention.
However, interactive programs, tutorials, and videos necessitate some time and effort. Furthermore, special software is required to create this content. But, you can be confident that this strategy will benefit you; after all, once you generate an engaging handbook, you can use it to teach hundreds of staff.
You can choose a platform with authoring tools to develop manuals and other educational resources in eLearning or online course platforms, including questions, video, role-plays, and activities, rather than buying many pricey solutions and moving between them. Check if it has a PowerPoint add-in, as operating the software would be pretty simple when you already understand how to use PowerPoint.
Here are some samples of manuals you can make using such platforms:
Digital courses
Slides with text, photos, and “Next” buttons make up this type of instruction. You can construct it from scratch, just like PowerPoint slides, or convert a current Slideshow with instructions into an online handbook with a few clicks. The solution preserves all PowerPoint graphics, timings, and prompts.
You can add a quiz to your course to ensure your staff understands your guidebook’s content. You can create interesting graded tests using different question kinds, including multiple-choice questions, fill in the blanks, drag and drop, try to match, and sequences.
Tutorial videos
Some operations, such as fixing a laptop or a copier, could be difficult to describe just through images and text. However, even new employees may execute their responsibilities by watching films with clear narratives and subtitles and highlighting crucial areas.
Of course, you may shoot such a movie with your phone, but you’ll need special video-editing software to make it seem professional and add photos and captions.
Recording a screencast is the most excellent way to teach staff how to use digital technologies like CRM or email services. You can record your screen without a webcam or with audio. You can display a pointer and add click noises to emphasize your activities on the screen. Each step should have a visual clue so that your staff can readily repeat your actions.
Interactive short modules
You may utilize interactions to give your staff a quick tutorial on how to do things like perform a SWOT analysis, visualize your brand values, or give an office application tour. Please select an appropriate template and populate it with your graphics and text via online course platforms.
Provide your employees with a manual and keep track of their development
You’ve given yourself a manual. Perhaps you’ve developed an interactive masterwork, or maybe you didn’t have the time or resources to do so and had to rely on PDF instructions instead. Whatever information you have, you must distribute it to all staff and ensure that they study it.
A learning management system (LMS) is the ideal option here. An LMS will allow you to centralize all of your guides and other educational resources, as well as distribute content to employees and track how they’re using it.
If you don’t have an LMS, use a lightweight learning platform like PlayAblo to start online training immediately.
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You can use an LMS to:
- Create a centralized knowledge base to house all training materials and other instructional resources.
- Segment audiences to provide tailored learning paths for your staff.
- Sending invites and reminders, as well as managing deadlines, may all be automated.
- To measure the efficiency of your employee training, create specific reports.
- With a mobile app, you can deliver training on the go.
- For a consistent experience, customize the platform with your company’s branding.
- Use gamification tools like certificates and scoreboards to motivate your employees.
Gather feedback and modify your content
It’s time to gather comments after your staff has examined the employee training manual. This step will allow you to assess how valuable the guidebook is to your workers and how you may enhance it.
Pose questions to your learners regarding their learning experiences. You could, for example, send them a Google Form or survey questionnaire. The best part of utilizing an LMS is that you can build scale questions that show all of the semitones between “terrible” and “outstanding,” as well as “agree wholeheartedly” and “disagree strongly.”
You may wish to update your handbook after considering these suggestions for improving it: add more relevant content, adjust the design, or even convert it to another format. It may also have to be revised if some internal processes have changed, new goods and features have been produced, or the government has decided to change the law.
Please make a point of gathering all the file types for your guides so you can simply revisit them and make changes.
What are the 5 elements of an employee training manual?
If you have a large company with hundreds and thousands of personnel, you may require many handbooks for various job categories.
Naturally, producing each employee’s training manual from scratch takes time. Making a training manual format once is the ideal method to reduce development time. After you’ve taken care of the fundamentals, such as shape, texture, and color, you’ll get more time or space to concentrate on the text. This approach will ensure that each instructional resources have the same look and feel as the rest of your company.
Making a template for creating an employee training manual as an online course might be very simple. Some writing tools have pre-made templates that you may use as-is or change slightly to better match your brand. Let’s take a look at them and discover what a training handbook template should include:
- The welcome screen: The title and description of your manual can be entered on the welcome screen. They must concisely convey the guide’s topic and demonstrate to prospective learners how studying it will benefit them.
- Objectives: You can list the skills and knowledge that your employees will get after finishing the course in this section. Learners will feel better prepared for the burden if the objectives have been adequately stated.
- The main menu: The table of contents is on this slide. It enables your students to navigate between different modules in your guidebook.
- Content of the manual: The core of your instruction is the manual content module. You can recycle different designs for various content types.
- Conclusion: This slide highlights a learner’s accomplishments. You can use this space to recap their knowledge and skills, congratulate them on completing training successfully, or lead them towards the next phase in their training course.
Wrapping it up
Companies that engage in corporate training generate 218 percent more revenue per employee than those that do not. This is understandable given that they receive a return on their investment in the form of increased employee efficiency and productivity.
You’ll need the correct tools to develop practical training manuals, which are more than simply dull text. Get a free trial of PlayAblo and start creating engaging and interactive materials instantly!
Ad: PlayAblo’s Enterprise-Grade Micro-Learning platform is built for millennial learners. Micro-Learning, along with assessments and gamification features, ensures learning outcome measurement and sustained engagement.
Find out more and request a custom demo!
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