Remote Workers
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to adopt remote work. While many people prefer a work-from-home (WFH) setup, it also presents certain challenges. For instance, when employees or freelancers need to complete training courses, companies usually schedule a meeting in the office to ensure everyone is present. But with the WFH setup, it can be challenging to set mandatory training among remote workers. Here’s where microlearning comes in.
What Is Microlearning?
Microlearning involves getting your eLearning in smaller, digestible portions that people can easily comprehend compared to longer, content-heavy sessions. While most people benefit from microlearning, it’s particularly well-suited for telecommuting employees.
Why Should Remote Workers Use Microlearning?
Here are some of the reasons companies should adopt microlearning for remote employees:
Easily Connect With Global Workers
Remote work allows you to hire team members or freelancers across the globe. Microlearning allows you to easily connect with your team no matter where they are. Smaller units of information can be distributed through email or Google Drive, compared to traditional training where your entire team needs to be in the same place at the same time. Microlearning allows more flexibility so that remote workers can watch training videos at their own pace.
Shorter Courses Are Easier To Complete
Chances are, your team has a set of daily responsibilities to complete on top of the training courses they need to watch. Microlearning sessions usually don’t exceed more than 20 minutes, making it easier for your employees to complete the course during their workday. Longer courses are likely to impede their workday, but with shorter videos, they’ll be able to complete them within the deadline.
Better Understanding Of The Course
Besides making it easier to complete, microlearning helps your employees understand the concepts the training provides. As a result, microlearning can significantly improve an employee’s skills and expertise and increase workplace productivity.
How To Apply Microlearning In The Workplace
Now that we know the benefits of microlearning, here’s how you can implement it:
Identify Your Goals
Before you start your training courses, it’s important to define your team’s goals. For example, you might give them a single deadline for longer courses to complete the entire training course. But with microlearning, you can assign a series of deadlines that allows your team to hit milestones and complete their training in no time.
Create Microlearning Lessons For Your Employees
After identifying your goal, the next step is to create or compile a training course for your team. Microlearning is an excellent format for creating a comprehensive course for remote workers. If you hand over a three-hour long training video, there’s a risk of packing too much information in a single training session. This decreases the likelihood of retaining information and using it effectively.
A series of shorter videos allows you to cover more information without burdening your team with too much information. They can go through the training course and process the information at their own pace. It also helps to create content that matches their attention spans. Videos are processed more effectively compared to text, so you’d want to incorporate more videos than long articles or PowerPoint presentations.
Personalize With Video Clips
Remote workers often don’t feel as involved due to the distance among members. Make them feel involved and connected by including familiar faces and voices in training videos.
Make Training Interactive
Apart from the training videos, you can try scheduling a biweekly call so they can ask questions and clarifications regarding the training. It’s also a way to monitor whether your team members watched the videos or not. You can also make training more interactive by using chat pods, polls, or digital whiteboards.
Content Must Be Easily Accessible
A higher number of short videos makes your training materials more accessible. Storing bite-sized videos in one place makes it easier for your team members to access the information when they need to reference back to them. When important information is buried in long videos, it may be harder to look back to.
Allow Your Team Members To Learn More About The Training Course
You can provide team members with additional resources about the topic, like links to studies, forums, guides, etc. This allows them to expand further their knowledge on what they’ve learned.
Assess Your Team Members
After they completed the training course, assess your team members to see what they’ve learned throughout the training. This is also a great opportunity to see if the course is good enough to teach your other employees. You can then edit and adjust the training courses as necessary for future telecommuting employees.
How To Use A Learning Management System
Microlearning is a great format for training courses, whether your employees work remotely or not. Companies can create personalized microlearning courses for each member of the team. Remember that each person has a different learning style.
Microlearning allows you to create a customized training plan for each employee depending on how they learn, how fast they work, and the material they need to learn. You can also adjust the metric specific to each team member, as certain members may have different training needs. Microlearning allows you to break up the courses into smaller videos depending on what’s needed.
The Bottom Line
Personalized microlearning is a great way to keep your remote workers accountable. You can easily track their progress even when you’re unable to check in with them every day in a physical workplace. When they’re stuck on a certain part of the course, you can get in touch with them to see what they need to help push them to completion.
Microlearning is flexible, customizable, and easy to digest—a format that’s well-suited to remote workers. When your team members are scattered across the globe, microlearning allows them to participate and process the information in the training courses your offer. Microlearning is effective because bite-sized courses are less mentally draining and aren’t as time-consuming as traditional learning methods.
