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Building online learning communities is a great way to motivate learners to accomplish much more than what traditional learning environments can achieve. This is especially true for the retail teams, which have always been hard to nail down. The new distance learning methods enable companies to train their learners quickly and effectively, wherever they are in the world, develop the internal knowledge exchange culture, and communicate the latest news in real-time.
Prioritizing the engagement of this heterogeneous population helps build a strong ambassadors' community around your brand. To do it right requires thought, planning, and managed execution. The more your community will grow, the more effective it will be in meeting your company's learning and business goals.
The benefits of building an online learning community
The online learning community for retail teams is a cost-effective way to boost employee performance. A community with a cause, with a mission, and with energy— is key for your brand success externally and internally, as it's also a good lever for your global internal communications strategy. Learners feel like they're part of something bigger, and this shared sense of purpose is essential to motivate them to become better in their jobs, as they are your brand's ambassadors, dealing face-to-face with the clients.
An engaged community, easy to reach, is excellent for immediate feedback when a new product or a new training is launched.
Here you can find some tips for effective community engagement strategies...
Build momentum, maintain interest, drive growth
It's all about developing your brand's internal culture and creating a sense of belonging among learners that strengthens brand loyalty. You start by creating rituals and opportunities for your employees to learn more about the company, products, and services. Please encourage them to exchange ideas and create events that are exclusive to the group. Communicate and promote the learners' community and its members in a professional manner that reflects your brand.
Make it fun by gamifing the community engagement, for example, by giving people points for answering questions or based on their posting activity. Running competitions, fill-in-the-blank questions, and hosting challenges. When done right, they can generate quite a bit of user-generated content, such as photos, videos, and more. If you run a learners' community for beginners, for example, you could run a 30-day challenge.
Always ask for your community's point of view, as they are in permanent contact with the clients, their feedback is more than e gift, so ask for it.
An important step is investing in growing a community of like-minded individuals who exchange on-the-job tips and knowledge with one another, grow as individuals, and contribute to the community.
Developing an influential online learning community indeed requires a combination of skills, capabilities, and time, but it's worth the investment. Once you know how to nurture a great learning community and practice it, it can become the foundation of future learning initiatives.
Final thoughts
You can't drive change without communities. Your learners and business stakeholders depend on the communities they live and breathe to accomplish the actual work that generates real business value. Whether you are building a learning community in your organization or thinking about starting one, you need to take the time to understand how you can drive collective impact, inspire action, and drive growth through these communities.