The hardest pill to swallow about high employee turnover is that it’s completely preventable.

42% of employees who voluntarily left their job report that their organisation “could have done something to prevent them from leaving.”

Employee and learner engagement – or a lack thereof – sits at the crux of this issue. In making workplace learning the most engaging and useful it can possibly be, you’re already leagues ahead of the organisations who could have done something to hold onto their employees, but didn’t. 

At Thrive, we’re well aware of the fact that the metric of “learner engagement” is L&D’s white whale; the goal we’re all chasing. (Along with impact, which naturally follows engagement.)

Ultimately, learner engagement improves when learning earns its place in the working day. And that onus should be on the learning, not the learner. “Engagement” isn’t a personality trait. Its presence or absence is simply a natural, human response to experience. 

Everything from the learning content itself, through to the way it's delivered, and even when it’s delivered, can have an impact.

The good news is that engagement can be designed for, rather than chased after.

What follows is a practical look at how organisations can increase learner engagement by aligning learning with how people actually work.

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How to increase learner engagement using an LMS in the workplace

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1. Start with how people spend their time

We’ve explored the idea of “context switching” in previous blogs: the concept of an employees’ attention and time bouncing between different tabs and tools, therefore gradually weakening over time. 

In the era of tech bloat, attention is naturally pulled in several different directions. Learning that ignores that reality will struggle to land. Simply put: Engaging learning fits easily into existing routines. It meets people where they already are, rather than asking them to stop everything they’re doing and step out of their day into a totally different system. 

How do you meet people where they already are? Start with how people are spending their time, and make learning a natural extension of that. That might look like short, microlearning moments that support a task already in progress, or content surfaced in seconds right at the point a decision needs to be made. 

When learning respects time, people are more willing to give it some of theirs.

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2. Make learning’s relevance obvious from the first click

Have you ever been watching TikTok or YouTube shorts, and snapped out of your doom-scroll stupor to notice that you’ve flicked past a video before it even had a chance to try and grab you? Research shows that viewers decide whether or not they want to continue watching a video within the first three seconds. That’s how long you have to grab the modern audience: three tiny, precious seconds. 

Zooming out of the context of a short video, this principle also applies to learning content. If your learners aren’t willing to donate an extra second of their attention to a video of a cute cat or a Dyson Airwrap tutorial, what makes you think they’ll give up time from their working day?

Titles, descriptions, content, context, tone… all of these factors collaborate to determine whether or not a piece of your learning will effectively break through the noise, and capture your learners’ attention once and for all. 

Where do you begin? The starting point here is to ensure that learners can clearly see why this learning is relevant to them. Who exactly is it for, and why does it exist? 

Vague promises about far-off growth or development rarely succeed in holding people’s attention. Clear signals about immediate, practical value do. 

You may think this only applies to shiny, fun learning campaigns or additional learning – but compliance is also a part of this strategy. When compliance content effectively explains its real-world impact, engagement naturally rises to meet it. If it’s disconnected from the realities of day-to-day work, it becomes nothing more than a box-ticking exercise – and you’ll see engagement fall as a result.

Relevance is not a layer added at the end. It starts at the point of entry.

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3. Design for momentum

We’re big proponents of microlearning at Thrive; it’s a core part of our offering. But don’t mistake this as a rejection of long-form learning. 

Long courses are not automatically ineffective. They simply need strong reasons to exist. There are plenty of learning programmes that ask learners to persist, but don’t offer feedback or a sense of progress along the way. That’s where they ultimately fall short and see learners dropping off as a result. Give people a sense of momentum, and they’ll be motivated to continue. 

How can learning create a sense of movement? People don’t feel motivated to walk down a road if it’s a long, endless stretch disappearing over the horizon. They need to see the directions in front of them with quantifiable check-in points. Embed clear milestones into your learning, such as achievement badges, points, or certificates. Those mini dopamine-hits of achievement will motivate learners to continue and remove points of resistance from the entire process.

In other words: People are more likely to return to learning that feels manageable. Momentum builds when the experience feels achievable within the gaps of a working day.

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4. Reduce effort wherever possible

Effort is one of the biggest barriers to learner engagement. 

It’s tricky to quantify, because it’s not immediately obvious – but once you spot the small things that add effort to the learning process, it becomes impossible to ignore. 

For example: 

• A clunky, ineffective search function that doesn’t return the right results, or at least not the ones your people need at that moment
• Navigation that feels so cluttered that it’s unusable, with no clear signposting as to what people are supposed to be learning, when, and why
• Content buried deep under the digital rubble, so that people have to pick through mountains of irrelevant training to find what they actually need
• AI features bolted on as an afterthought, resulting in a feature that gets in the way instead of making things easier or more efficient

Each of these is another barrier to entry, steadily stacking up and making it harder and less appealing for your people to engage with learning at all. An engaging learning platform will remove decisions, instead of adding them.

How do you reduce effort in your learning platform? Engaging learning platforms remove barriers to learning. Here’s your “engaging learning platform” checklist:

• A slick, intuitive user interface that makes it immediately obvious which content is a priority and acts as a digital front door to work
• Easy-to-use navigation and search that remove barriers instead of adding them
• AI that is built in, not bolted on, and acts as a multi-purpose colleague: Content creator, administrator, coach. As a result, it anticipates your people’s needs – instead of reacting to them. #
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5. Build engagement through visibility

Learning feels more relevant when it’s visible. 

When people can clearly see how learning shows up in the working day – whether that’s colleagues sharing content or applying what they’ve learned to real situations – it stops feeling like a solitary, mandatory activity and becomes a natural part of the organisation’s rhythm. 

Visibility doesn’t need to look like a big, performative announcement. 

How do I increase visibility? Small, simple signals are enough. For example:

• A shared recommendation
• A recognised achievement
• A manager referencing learning in a meeting
• An engaging community post in a shared Space that invites conversation

Engagement grows when learning has a presence beyond the platform.

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Where Thrive fits into learner engagement

Thrive is built around the idea that learning should feel like an intuitive, relevant extension of everyday work. Content appears when it matters most, recommendations adapt to the user, progress is visible without feeling heavy handed, and AI is intentionally built in. 

If you’re curious about how Thrive could increase your team’s engagement, book a demo today. 

For further reading, take a look at these case studies:

Ann Summers turned everyday learning into a 330% engagement boost

Burger King reduced employee turnover after switching to Thrive

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