The procedure involving upskilling your employees using any digital media, irrespective of their location is called remote training. This pattern of training employees has become the new normal over the past few years primarily because of the critical effect COVID-19 had on health, businesses, and the overall world economy. Several organizations had to adapt themselves to this new form of work culture at a rapid pace and within a short period.
Research suggests that approximately 36.2 million Americans will take up remote work by 2025. While some companies like Spotify, Dropbox, etc . have allowed their employees to work remotely during their entire tenure of serving the company, some organizations have taken up the hybrid work culture. Thus, it has become imperative for every hiring manager to train their remote workers rigorously to maintain Company’s work culture and vision.
Benefits Of Remote Training:
- Affordable: Remote training is economical, as there is no involvement of any instructor-led training labor charge reducing expenses. Despite its insignificance, printing involves 3% of any company’s annual revenue, which declines because of this online training. Moreover, trainees only need a computer or mobile and an internet connection to access the training program.
- Flexible and user-friendly: Each employee’s schedule is organized according to their priority levels. And in every person’s daily life, office work or training are not the only things that matter. As a result, remote work cultures are becoming increasingly popular as they allow employees to work and complete training at their own pace.
- Time savior: Whenever a recruit adds up to the company, a tonne of time of not just the HR department but every organizational department is consumed making introduction presentations. But for remote training, the initial content development is the only input required. Cause once it’s done, you can simply forward it to every new employee, thus saving a lot of time. In fact for the employees, remote training is suitable because they do not need to travel to the training locations thus valuing their time too.
- Course material is scalable: As introductory messages and videos are created initially, it is necessary for the hiring team to continuously keep themselves and the content updated to avoid any kind of confusion the newbie might have. Add the updated part at the end or cut that backdated section from the video and add the updated one. In this way, you can avoid a lot of time and chaos.
Tips For HRs To Train Remote Workers:
- Use different file types: To make the remote training sessions more engaging, use varied file types, like videos, audio, worksheets, presentations, Webinars, etc. Provide MCQs after every session for the learners and also short projects on which they can work upon. These short exercises would help them implement their knowledge and enhance their skills.
- Deliver mobile-friendly content: As approximately 58.26% of the crowd visit digital media via cell phones (data as of May 2022), it has become essential for every organization to try and deliver mobile-friendly content to ensure 100% involvement from every employee. This is one of the simpler processes when it comes to providing practical online training.
- Self-paced tutorials: Not entirely, but a few sections of the training can be made self-paced. Provide an overall deadline and ask them to complete the task as they wish. This would help trainees relax a bit yet complete their work before the deadline.
- Gamify the learning process: Try to make the process as interesting as you can. Many LMSs have the feature of awarding the one completing their task badges and pageants and leaderboards as well. These few creativities enable the germination of healthy competition within each employee.
- Ensure regular feedback both to and from learners: Ensure providing and receiving timely feedback from employees. As this would help you address any pain point of your worker and also enable your employee to become more productive. Kirkpatrick’s training evaluation model can be used to create a KPI framework to assist the training as well as measure the efficacy of remote training at various training stages. By choosing the appropriate KPIs, you can design training that is efficient and improve the financial success of your company. Try involving surveys, one-to-one discussions, etc . as a part of the feedback process.
- Use the assistance of training software: LMS are popular for their incomparable assistance in the field of online training and learning. With the help of an LMS, such as Cloud Academy, there is no fear of getting your training material lost or losing track of your employee’s performance. It has a centralized management system that stores all the necessary information any HR team might require, it can be used to create and edit the material, and also organize webinars.
- Try developing a learning culture: The idea of learning must be instilled in your employee’s minds right from the moment they join your business and should the thought should persist throughout their tenure with you. This means that rather than being a one-time event, the online training you provide should be part of their daily routine. This is an important task for employers as it has been observed that companies who invest in employee training irrespective of the mode of work, experience less turnover and huge productivity. It gets quite easier for them to train their employees for any new skill set.
Final Thoughts: Remote workers can significantly contribute to the success of any business. Therefore, educating and training them is just as significant as training staff working in person. The above-mentioned tips might prove to be of some help to the HRs in training recruits remotely.