Maintaining a healthy work environment is imperative to the success of a business, in any industry. If certain individuals at a company do not feel comfortable expressing any needs or concerns they may have, the overall morale may be compromised.
Experiential learning methods can be implemented into workplace training to provide a clear focus on boosting the confidence of individual employees to allow them to engage with their roles and ultimately progress long term.
There are several aspects of experiential learning that can be utilised to ensure that employees are improving their confidence and getting the most out of workplace training programmes.
Business simulations
Enabling individual employees to immerse themselves in surroundings similar or mirrored to real workplace scenarios, business simulations are a useful experiential learning tool to develop the skills of a workforce.
From a professional perspective, being able to work in situations that do not pose any risk, and being able to later reflect on what was done well and what could be improved on, individuals will gain the confidence to be able to harness their skills back in the workplace on a regular basis.
From a personal perspective, business simulations work to group individuals together to deal with workplace scenarios. Allowing employees to take part in team-building workplace training activities while improving their professional skills in their respective field can give people the confidence to engage more with others to improve productivity.
Team-building in workplace training
Similar to business simulations, broader experiential learning activities such as webinars, virtual reality tasks and microlearning all help to develop team-building skills, and help build confidence in the workplace.
According to a study, 32% of UK employees are afraid of putting their own ideas forward due to lack of confidence. By promoting team activities in workplace training, individuals gain the courage to put their views forward in a risk-free environment and be heard by others.
Experiential learning to build commercial awareness
Developing commercial skills across a workforce is an essential part of what makes any business run smoothly. By gaining an understanding of how the company works and how the industry as a whole is developing, employees can engage with their roles more with sufficient knowledge of the sector in which they work. By introducing a focus on commercial awareness throughout experiential learning workshops and activities, employee confidence can be improved by giving a workforce the opportunity to perform more proficiently in their roles, confident of precisely what is required of them regularly.
As opposed to merely providing a workforce with the relevant information required to help them succeed, adopting an experiential learning approach allows employees to have their voices heard while developing their skills at the same time.
By promoting active methods of workplace training, business leaders will be able to construct a positive workforce that has the confidence to succeed in their roles and express any ideas or opinions they may have.