How managers can boost team engagement with learning

Discover how to engage line managers in workplace learning to boost employee participation and performance.

Imagine you’ve recently rolled out a well-designed learning programme across your organisation. It’s packed with engaging content from subject matter experts, is supported by an intuitive LMS and has strong executive support. But three months in, there are signs that learner engagement is flat. When you investigate, you hear one common explanation: “My manager never mentioned it.”

Line managers play a crucial role in translating organisational goals into meaningful, everyday development for their teams. When they feel supported and confident, they can be powerful champions of learning that inspire the same behaviours in others.

Let’s take a closer look at why line manager engagement is essential, how to secure their buy-in and practical ways your learning management system can help bring them on board.

How does line manager involvement affect learner engagement?

There’s strong evidence that line managers significantly impact employee engagement with learning and work more broadly. For example, one study of 50,000 people by Impulse found that employees who felt well supported by their line manager were 3.4x more likely to feel engaged at work than those who didn’t feel supported, with engagement scores of 81% compared to just 28% when support was lacking.

In addition, there’s evidence that line manager engagement directly influences team engagement. According to Gallup, a manager’s approach is responsible for up to 70% of the variance in team engagement levels. This means that whether or not a manager shows up makes the biggest difference in how connected and motivated a team feels. This is true of a team’s approach to learning, too. Challenges to high engagement scores included:

• ✳️ A command-and-control leadership structure
• ✳️ Competing priorities for frontline managers
• ✳️ Heavy manager workload due to excessive expectations outside managerial tasks

How can L&D help managers overcome these challenges and drive engagement with learning within their teams (and, ultimately, drive performance)?

1. Support your line managers in becoming learning champions

Line manager behaviour sets the tone for how learning and development is perceived within a team. Instead of asking line managers to drive positive learning behaviours in others, start by empowering them to lead through their own development. When managers actively participate in learning and share their success stories, it signals that learning is valued and relevant.

Think about all the times you’ve asked for recommendations from others or listened to success stories that have inspired you. Personal learning journeys are what make development relatable. For example, a manager might talk to their team about how a ‘Leading Through Change’ programme helped them successfully guide their team during a restructure. Another might talk about how an inclusive leadership course opened their eyes to unconscious bias and led them to change how they run meetings, assign work or handle feedback. 

These personal development stories carry far more weight than top-down directives and help people to understand the value of learning. 

Your learning management system can amplify these stories and encourage cross-team inspiration. In Totara and Moodle, for example, managers can create informal spaces to post reflections, learning stories or articles that influenced their thinking. These spaces can be open to their teams or peers, fostering a culture of visible, shared learning. Managers can upload short videos, write posts or link to the courses that helped them, transforming their personal learning into inspiration for others.

By giving managers the space and tools to share their stories, you normalise learning as part of day-to-day work and position them as active participants in a learning culture.

2. Equip your managers to foster a learnability mindset

To improve engagement, one of the most valuable contributions a line manager can make is to foster a learnability mindset, which refers to the drive and ability to grow through continuous learning. According to an article in Harvard Business Review, your line managers can do three key things to support learnability in the workplace:

• ✅ Select for it – Focus on employees who demonstrate great learnability and a thirst for knowledge.
• ✅ Nurture it – Encourage positive learning behaviour by leading by example.
• ✅ Reward it – Give your colleagues recognition for demonstrating keen learnability to encourage positive habits.

Tools like Totara and Moodle support this by making learning activity visible, shareable and rewardable. Managers can highlight their own takeaways in discussion spaces and assign badges for development milestones. 

Rewarding positive learning behaviours through badges or encouraging friendly competition through leaderboards in Synergy Learning’s exclusive Spark LMS theme also drives learner engagement. Dashboards also enable line managers to spot and support high-learnability individuals at a glance and to identify those who need further encouragement.

3. Integrate learning into 1:1s and development conversations

One of the major challenges when setting learning-based goals is that objectives, outcomes or discussion points are never mentioned again once the conversation is over. When this disconnect happens, goals can often feel like a one-off task rather than a continuous part of personal development.

This is why it’s so important to create a continuous feedback loop between employees and managers. According to Gallup, employees who receive meaningful feedback frequently are far more likely to be engaged, with 80% reporting full engagement at work after recent feedback. Feedback shouldn’t have to wait until the annual performance review. Quarterly, monthly or even weekly feedback check-ins help people address issues and improve sooner, plus they’ll feel supported along the way.

In Totara Perform, you can embed learning objectives within performance reviews and development plans. Managers can see what training supports which competency or skill and follow up accordingly. In Moodle Workplace, organisational hierarchies and reporting dashboards let managers view team‑level learning progress, helping connect structured learning paths to career and development discussions. 

By improving the visibility of learning goals and making them part of regular conversation, managers can reiterate how learning is a continuous, supported journey. When learning becomes a standing agenda item, it signals that growth is valued and expected, creating stronger accountability and deeper engagement.

4. Reduce cognitive load through automation

Line managers spend every day balancing performance pressures, people management, meetings and strategic priorities every day, so even the most engaged manager can find it tricky to stay on top of learning activity without support. Simple workflows and automation make it far easier to manage and encourage learning. Here are some automations you can use in your LMS to help:

• ✳️ Automated nudges and reminders – Rather than relying on line managers to remember who’s doing what, let your LMS handle the prompting. Automated reminders for upcoming deadlines, course completion alerts and early warnings when a learner hasn’t progressed can keep managers in the loop without adding to their workload.
  
• ✳️ Automated reports and digest emails – Rather than expecting managers to log into an LMS dashboard daily, send them a regular snapshot of what matters most. For example:
  • – Weekly or monthly learning progress summaries
  • – Highlights of team members who achieved new certifications
  • – A digest of overdue items across the team
    
• ✳️ Trigger learning based on real-time events – Use automation to create learning snapshots that respond to real work, rather than just compliance schedules. For example, you could assign onboarding programmes when someone joins a new role, trigger refresher modules when a certification is about to expire or launch leadership content when someone is promoted. This ensures learners receive the right learning at the right time, and removes the burden from line managers to remember to assign it.

Ready to boost learner engagement?

Book a meeting to discuss how learning technologies and automation can help empower line managers to drive engagement across their teams.

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