As the costs of the Great Resignation continue to grow, companies need more ways to attract and retain employees. One clear approach is to offer more training and development — according to a 2019 LinkedIn study, 94% of employees said they would stay with their employer if it invested in their development.

However, the rise of remote work complicates things. In Training Magazine’s 2021 Training Industry Report, respondents said their biggest challenge was “getting people engaged in remote training.”

Some companies are trying to solve this through better technology. New delivery formats, like cohort-based courses and technologies like virtual reality can significantly enhance the effectiveness of remote training.

But another solution to engaging employees may lie closer to home: involving managers. A recent Gallup survey found that “at least 70% of the variance in team engagement is explained by the quality of the manager or team leader.” It would seem that this solution is often overlooked — most managers express a dim view of the effectiveness of their Learning and Development (L&D) function.

Companies should correct this. Below are five simple but effective steps to create a more active role for managers in training and developing employees:

Let managers tell you what they need.

Managers have a keen sense of the skills their team members need to build, and research shows that they are more likely to initiate training than an HR or training professional.

Companies should establish a process to discover and quantify training needs directly from managers. This could be in the form of a regular survey, supplemented by in-depth discussions with a selected group of managers who can give feedback and guidance on training initiatives as they’re designed.

Ørsted, the global green energy company headquartered in Denmark, has adopted this approach. In 2020, the company launched a training program for all employees called “Power Your Career.” “Our goal was to improve employee retention and career mobility,” explains Terese Korsgaard Christensen, lead HR consultant at Ørsted.

To design an effective program, Christensen and her colleagues needed to learn what was causing staff to feel stuck in their careers. The team conducted 15 in-depth interviews with managers across multiple levels in the company, followed by four focus groups. The resulting program focused on addressing specific issues that managers said were holding back employee development, like how to give more constructive feedback and how to have more effective one-on-one meetings with employees. It also included a mandatory component for managers called “Power Your Team.”

“It was a lot more work to spend all that time initially with so many managers, but our impact studies after the program confirmed that having managers involved at multiple points was critical to success. We’ve seen a marked improvement in the quality of manager and employee interaction and a greater focus on continuous development”, says Christensen.