According to Flexjobs, about 4.7 million Americans were already working remotely when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With the current social distancing norms and lockdowns imposed by governments, this number has surely grown exponentially. Looking at this trend, and the many benefits of a remotely working team, it is becoming clearer every day that remotely working resources are going to be commonplace in the future of work. This means, businesses must prepare to adapt to the change. While maintaining operational efficiency is important while going through this change, it is also important for businesses to ensure their employee training efforts don’t take a hit. This is especially challenging because online training is riddled with its own unique challenges.
In this article, we will be talking about the various best practices you can follow to deliver quality, impactful learning experiences to your employees that have just begun their remote working journey. Let us begin.
Use Technology To Your Advantage
Thankfully, there were already many elearning tools being used widely before virtual training became a necessity. This means, today, businesses with all sizes of training budget can afford to use the technology to train their employees. An enterprise learning management system (LMS) is one of the best tools that you can use to facilitate virtual training. An enterprise LMS helps businesses organize, manage, and efficiently deliver their training content. It also allows users to track progress, manage course participants, and control access to the content. For instance, learning management systems have become cheaper and more user friendly than ever before.
If you check out the Mindflash LMS pricing, you will be pleasantly surprised to see how affordable it is to treat your employees with a delightful training experience. You can use elearning tools like learning management systems to make training engaging and to track how your employee training efforts are performing. Learning management systems offer a variety of features that can be employed to make the employee training experience more impactful. For instance, features like Geofencing can allow you to deliver training to your employees’ mobile devices (in the form of notifications) when they arrive at a pre-specified geographical location. This technology can be employed to deliver just-in-time training to your employees by making the most relevant information available to them at the right time.
Make Mobile-Friendly Training Content
Speaking of delivering just-in-time training to employees on their smartphones, in order to do so, you will need to invest in a mobile-first training strategy. This doesn’t just mean purchasing training tools that enable delivery of training experiences on mobile devices, it also means developing training content that is geared for mobile delivery.
Develop A Blended Learning Experience
Blended learning is the term used for training that combines self-paced learning lessons and instructor led training. While providing blended training in a virtual-only environment was once a problem, with the rise of web conferencing tools, it has become possible. Modern web conferencing tools come loaded with training specific features such as virtual whiteboards and built-in video recording.
Schedule Training Only During Office Hours
Thanks to the sudden shift to working from home, the work life balance of many employed professionals has taken a serious hit. Without proper work life balance, the chances of a mental burnout become exponentially higher. While maintaining work life balance with the schedule of work is important, it is also important for employers to ensure they are not asking their employees to punch in extra hours for the training. If, however, you feel that there may be some times when the training is happening during working hours and an employee may miss it, it is wise to use the video recording feature of your web conferencing tool (mentioned in the previous point) to record instructor led lectures and make them available for later viewing.
Conclusion
Training remote employees can be very different from training employees inside your office. The unique challenges associated with virtual training will require some innovative solutions. We hope that the best practices mentioned in this article will help you get a strong start with your virtual employee training efforts.
