Before we dive into 5 tips for effective remote training, it is vital to understand the importance of employee training.

Importance of employee training

Training is vital for the growth and success of every organization. It is profitable for both the employers and employees of an organization. If an employee is trained well, he/she will become more competent, prolific, and productive. There are numerous benefits of employee training but to keep the long story short, training improves the self-confidence of employees, reduces the need for supervision, reduces the rate of mishaps, and most importantly it increases the productivity of employees. What else can an employer ask for? Right?

Amidst the need for social distancing and whole cities in lockdown, COVID-19 is changing the way people work. Most of the organizations have shifted to work remotely and more employees than ever before are working remotely which also implies the need for remote training. Now, it is very important to understand the difference between remote work and remote training.

Let’s jump in and have a look at what the hype is all about.

Remote work vs. remote training

Remote work refers to a working style that lets employees work from a place of their choice rather than a typical office environment. That place can be home, restaurant, coffee shop or even a scenic place. Employees feel happy and prefer this type of work because they cannot only save their traveling time but also commute costs and spend it on the things they love.

With remote work comes the remote training, remote training refers to training the employees without being physically present at the venue using various techniques and methods like webinars, e-learning courses, podcasts, face-to-face live internet training, and the list goes on. Remote training not only saves the time of employers and employees but also helps in saving the traveling and lodging costs. Remote training is not only important but also a very useful process to keep the trainees updated and to discuss important matters.

Use the current circumstances to make your employees better

When challenging times come, you can choose to panic, or you can choose to grow. Are you a business owner, employer or manager whose team is forced to work from home due to COVID-19 outbreaks? Or are you finding yourself with extra downtime? Focusing on growth can be a great way to help both your mental and physical health. You can take advantage of this time by training your employees remotely and by supporting them to work remotely. This will not only keep you busy but will also help your employees to keep the organization running effectively.

Here are 5 simple and easy tips for effective remote training.

• Make it accessible 

For remote training, training lessons must be accessible on a range of devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops. For this purpose, the “cloud” offers a shared pool of learning resources (e.g., training materials, lessons, technical resources, and demonstrations) that can offer a range of benefits. This approach provides flexible and on-demand training at any time, any place and on any device.

• Engage with trainees

To keep your trainees away from the fierce number of online distractions you need to find ways to engage with your remote team to keep them focused and motivated. You can collaborate with them by chatting through online forums, live messaging systems and video conferencing so that they feel connected. Also, trainees will get more out of sessions by hearing out their co-worker’s experiences and interacting with them. You should keep interaction time in all your training sessions.

• Make it organic

While training your employees it is important to keep in mind that organic learning is essential in remote training. You can achieve this by delivering the training sessions in the live application while the trainees are also working on their application, because hands-on training is the most important factor in increasing the productivity of employees.

• Set goals and objectives

With remote training comes the hardship of evaluating the effectiveness of training. At some points of remote training sessions, it becomes impossible to identify whether the employees are keeping the pace with you or are they understanding what you are trying to deliver? To overcome this problem, you can create multiple types of small questionnaires and quizzes, so that trainees can get feedback from you and you can get insights into trainee’s performance and progress.

• Track results and improvements

To track training sessions results and progress of each employee you can introduce SSO (Single Sign-On technology) which will enable each trainee to have friction-less access to training resources. SSO not only improves access to resources but enables the administrator to report on trainee system access and usage frequency, that way you can track the progress of each trainee.

To sum up, remote employees have to rely solely on the training materials you provide them. Hence, it is very important to create an effective training program for remote workers to ensure maximum output.

* This post first published at Assima website.