5 Tips For Effective Remote Workforce Training
While remote work might seem like a fleeting trend, positive results like reduced turnover, happier staff and increased productivity have cemented flexible work arrangements into the DNA of most company cultures. The workplace is evolving, so companies are adapting their approaches to hiring and training employees who aren’t always (or ever) in the office.
That’s right. Training remains critical to staff and company growth, even when teams are dispersed. In fact, a recent remote work survey found that 87% of remote workers receive regular training, with 70% receiving it directly from their company. Still, are these companies doing a good job of it? And how do they manage the costs of travel?
Fortunately, with the help of a perfectly-featured LMS, you can deliver high-quality training to employees from New York to Timbuktu consistently, without the headaches associated with travel. Here are 5 foolproof ways to train remote employees without compromising their learning experience (or breaking the bank):
1. Make Your Courses Simple And Easy To Access
You’ll probably agree that passwords have become one of the greatest bugbears of the Digital Era. From online banking and email to social media accounts and Apple IDs, the average human has hundreds of numbers, letters and special characters swimming through their heads each day. Enter the Single Sign-On (SSO) method.
Today, SSO has become an accepted part of online navigation and management, because it allows people to access all of their cloud-based applications with the same login. Like a magic wand, SSO wafts away the hassles of training access and allows employees to start or resume their remote workforce training with just one click. Plus, when it’s combined with mobile integrations, SSO gives remote employees the flexibility to learn from anywhere.
Advantages like this have seen SSO embraced by the biggest of tech brands, including Google and Facebook. So, if your LMS doesn’t have SSO support, it’s time to upgrade.
2. Keep Training In One Place
The more flexible your working arrangements become, the more challenging it gets to provide on-premise training workshops. Of course, there’s always the option to fly, ship, or drive every employee and instructor to the same location, but you’d rather spend that money on remote training strategies to upskill staff.
The only concern is how to deliver the same training to all employees when they’re not in the same room. In fact, they might not even be in the same building or connected to the same company intranet.
You’re especially worried about onboarding remote employees because you know that onboarding is the magic moment when new employees decide to engage or disengage, so it has to be of consistently high quality. This is why you need a cloud LMS: to keep training centrally located and consistent but at the same time accessible all over the world.
With a cloud LMS like TalentLMS, new hires can be immediately added to the database, and their onboarding can be tracked wherever they are. From there on, you can continue to deliver high-quality remote training, all while saving on expensive network infrastructures.
3. Ensure That Learning Is Always Convenient
More than 70% of companies that successfully boost staff performance also deliver learning quickly enough to meet business needs [1]. But agility like this requires continuous learning and skills development, which means that remote workforce training must be accessible to all employees at all times, and from anywhere.
The solution? Native LMS apps for iOS and Android devices. Allow your remote workforce to learn on-the-go and just-in-time through the technology they love and use most: their mobile phones.
A word of caution, though. This remote training strategy only works when your learning content adjusts to different screen sizes and browsers. In other words, employees should be able to enjoy the same incredible learning experience whether they’re using a desktop computer, an iPhone, or a Samsung phone (even better if they can learn online and offline, too).
4. Make Training An Interactive Learning Experience
Technological innovations have transformed the world of work. Today, employees are in the constant presence of information, via emails, Whatsapp, Google, social media, phone calls, Slack messages—shall we continue?
This, of course, presents endless opportunities for learning and collaboration. At the same time, though, it puts your eLearning courses in fierce competition with other online distractions. This is especially true when employees aren’t under direct supervision in the office.
So, the question is, how to train remote employees in a way that captures and keeps their attention. And the answer is hidden in your LMS capabilities. Features that support video, infographics, live webinars, gamification and discussion forums empower you to make your remote workforce training fun and engaging.
This is probably why 80% of companies (Unlocking Potential 2016-17 Learning Benchmark Report, Towards Maturity) now use video learning to improve their training experience. Plus, an LMS that supports live video-conferencing solutions means that you can bring the instructor to the learner, wherever they are in the world, without the costs of travel. This way, real-time, in-person training strategies can still be used for engaging remote employees.
5. Monitor Learner Engagement And Performance
According to Gallup, remote employees are 31% more likely than their non-remote counterparts to feel that they have the opportunity to perform at their best every day [2]. Still, all employees want to know what they’re doing well, where they can improve, and which skills their next career advancement depend on.
One of the troubles with managing remote employees’ training, though, is that the traditional approaches to assessment and feedback aren’t always possible. For example, panic-inducing performance reviews in dark, cold offices, and assessment by observation are impossible (and probably not missed) when employees are located remotely.
So, how do managers provide their remote employees with the meaningful feedback and guidance they seek? They do it with the help of a powerful LMS like TalentLMS that keeps both learners and their managers in tune with their progress.
Find an LMS that supports multiple types of questions and tests, so that employees can get quick and relevant feedback from managers and instructors, no matter where they work. Use quizzes with automated feedback to help employees gauge their level of understanding as they progress through their remote workforce training.
Then, to keep managers up to speed, leverage extensive reporting features that provide information on learner progress, completion rates, learning performance, course engagement and more. These insights will become key discussion points for performance conversations and career planning discussions with remote employees.
Conclusion
One of the biggest remote training mistakes that companies make is not training their out-of-office employees at all. So, when it comes to training remote employees, don’t let ‘out of sight’ mean ‘out of mind’. Equip your remote teams with the powerful LMS features they need to make continuous learning a company-wide experience.
References:
[1] Unlocking Potential: Releasing the potential of the business and its people through learning (https://www.towardsmaturity.org/elements/uploads/Unlocking_Potential_-_Digital.pdf)
[2] State of the American Workplace (https://news.gallup.com/reports/199961/7.aspx?utm_source=gbj&utm_campaign=StateofAmericanWorkplace-Launch)
