Building a culture of continuous learning at any organisation takes significant investment of time, money, and efforts.
From developing relevant training courses and infrastructure to finding the right trainers, from getting the employees involved to ensuring the task doesn’t interfere with daily productivity of the business, a lot of work goes into establishing a learning and development machine at any organisation.
No doubt, the benefits of such a system and culture are multipronged. Some common benefits of an impactful learning culture at an organisation include improved retention rates, better employee loyalty, more productivity, access to skilled talent at low costs, and many others.
However, as the current global emergency forces everyone to stay confined within their homes, employee training and development, like all other aspects of business, has taken a serious hit.
Thankfully, there are many tools available that allow organisations to continue training employees even as they work from home.
In this article, we will discuss a few tips that you can utilise to effectively train remote employees.
Without further delay, let us jump right into it:
Get The Right Tools
In order to be able to deliver training to remote employees, you need remote training tools. The three most commonly used e-learning tools are:
- Authoring tools: As the name suggests, these are used to create training content. Authoring tools offer pre-loaded templates and themes that allow for quick creation of learner-centric training content.
- Learning Management Systems: Also known as LMS, these are platforms that can be used to manage, publish, and distribute training content with remote employees. Modern LMS also allow for creation of immersive training experiences by enabling learning administrators to employ techniques like gamification and social learning.
- Video Conferencing Tools: Many organisations are already using video conferencing tools for collaboration purposes. However, the best video conferencing software also offer features that are geared towards providing online training. Some such features are virtual whiteboards, in-built video recording, group chat feature, among many others.
There are tons of options available in the market for each of the tools mentioned above. You can pick and choose the ones that offer the features relevant to your company’s training needs and fit within your budget.
Rethink Training Curriculum
If your business has been taking care of its training needs within the office, switching to online delivery will require at least some changes to your training curriculum.
For starters, it may be a good idea to redesign some lessons/concepts for self-paced learning style. This might even involve reducing the number of topics/concepts that will be taught by an instructor.
Similarly, it is also recommended to break down long-form training content into focused, bite-sized chunks of information. This technique is called microlearning and has shown truly promising results when it comes to training effectiveness.
Train Your Trainers
For the concepts that require the guidance of an instructor, you need to ensure your trainers are ready and equipped with the knowledge they need to deliver effective virtual instructor led sessions.
Teaching online is quite different from teaching in a classroom-like setting. For starters, your instructors will not be able to look at the faces of learners, and may not be able to gauge if one particular learner is struggling with whatever they are explaining. To overcome this, they will need to get into the habit of regularly asking for verbal feedback during their lectures.
Similarly, your instructors may also need to learn to execute virtual ice-breaking activities in order to start their sessions in a productive manner.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to remind you to keep a close track of the effectiveness of your new online training program. Doing so would not be a challenge as many learning management systems come loaded with custom tracking and reporting capabilities that let you track the training metrics that matter to your organisation.
