Delivering Seamless Remote Employee Training
The impact of COVID-19 on the way enterprises tackle employee onboarding and training has been severe, much like with every other aspect of life. For some, it was redefining the majority of their processes and for some others, it was building a whole new strategy to cater to the growing needs of the remote workforce. Regardless of the size of the company, the one thing that has been universally acknowledged is that employee training is an investment that can more or less dictate how efficiently your company responds to crisis.
Having an effective employee training strategy in place not only assures consistent quality and volume of work, but it also makes employees feel more engaged with the company and their jobs. But what is crucial in today’s world is investing in a training method that is time and place agnostic. Classroom trainings will no longer serve as a reliable source of employee training considering that a vast majority of companies are increasingly taking to an entirely remote working structure.
This makes it inevitable to replace traditional training methods with ones that are more in tune with the challenges and realities attached with remote working. The fact of the matter is that even though the working conditions are different, employees’ expectations in terms of engagement will not change. So companies run the risk of high employee turnover rates unless they make clever training solution investments. One of the methods that most fortune 500 companies are leveraging is a digital adoption platform that serves as a virtual anytime-anywhere training guide for employees—but, we’ll get to that in just a bit.
Let’s first get a deeper understanding of what lies ahead when it comes to employee training, its role, and its scope in the new normal. This is easier when we look at it from two different perspectives:
1. Catering To The Needs Of The Remote Workforce
Remote training for your employees may seem like a recent problem that COVID-19 brought upon us, but this is far from the truth. Several companies that have pioneered the telecommuting model have been training their teams remotely for years now. And also, eLearning portals have been successfully conducting online classes and training students the world over for almost a decade now. So really, remote training has proven its efficacy for quite a while now and it is up to us to adopt the right solutions to our specific issues.
Proactive Resolution Of challenges
Being proactive when it comes to employee training is key to employee productivity. The difference between in-person training and virtual training is that there is no direct way to assess the impact of the training session because for the first day or two everyone feels like they have mastered the skill that they are being trained on. Knowledge retention is low in traditional F2F training because you cannot process something that you have not had hands-on experience with!
This is the problem that good employee training software solves. Post onboarding, you are able to understand how well (or not) your employees are using a particular tool by tracking their behavior. If you feel like a majority of your employees are struggling with a certain process inside the software, trigger "help content" to resolve that challenge proactively so they don’t have to waste time asking their peers or trying to find the way around it.
Audience Segmentation
One of the biggest advantages of going online with employee training is that you can deliver custom training material to employees by segmenting them in detail. This is especially great when you are, let’s say, training your call center agents. They have gone through multiple layers of training on how to go about performing their tasks, but you still need to make sure there is still an ongoing training mechanism in place for them that ensures consistency and upskilling. In this case, by segmenting your employees into "geos," time zones, roles, or any other custom segments, you can provide relevant, on-demand training so they feel like you have personalized a training program just for them.
Real-Time, Round-The-Clock Support
Imagine having to raise a support ticket every single time you had the smallest doubt about how a certain process worked or how to navigate software that was recently rolled out. In no universe can that be considered efficient because if you have an army of 100,000 employees working for your company, you can be sure that every single one of them will at some point or the other raise at least one support ticket relating solely to software navigation. Because enterprise applications are built for scale and not really for convenience, it is absolutely necessary that you provide your workforce with round-the-clock support to assist them with any challenges they may face while using this complex software. And the most efficient way to address such a heavy dependency on IT and support is to make your employees independent!
A DAP sits like a guide on top of your enterprise applications helping your employees when they are on the verge of making an error or are even struggling with not knowing how to proceed with a task.
Simple And Flexible Content Creation
While creating the content itself is a small part of the training offered by a DAP, traditional training methods consume a great deal of time and effort when it comes to their content creation process. A DAP helps you first identify the choking points of your employees, like we already discussed, and then address them by creating the help content in a matter of minutes. Most modern DAPs have a code-free editor which allows for easy content creation and publication. Identify an issue, create the "help content," and trigger it to the relevant audience, this is how a DAP helps you train your employees on your business processes and rules in real time, on the job, and without having to force employees to consult pages and pages of help content.
2. Catering To The Changing Needs Of The Organization
In the new normal, adopting the right technologies can give you a massive advantage over your competitors and also help motivate your employees to perform to the best of their ability. Training tech, like knowledge management software, learning management software, project management tools, and content creation tools, should all be part of your armory.
But the one tool that you simply cannot ignore in the digital first world is a digital adoption platform that combines several tools into one to empower you to ensure maximum ROI on your tech investments.
Simply investing in technology isn’t in itself a solution unless the technology is used to its fullest potential by every single user. A digital adoption platform can help you understand how effectively your workforce uses the software that they work on (or are intended to work on) and gives you a reality check on how you can improve the adoption of these tools. With the right DAP, you can expect to improve employee performance and productivity, reduce the burden on support teams, streamline employee training and onboarding, boost software adoption, increase ROI of your tech investments, and ensure business continuity no matter what the crisis.
