April 14, 2022

Train your Remote Employees – The 5 Best Strategies

How to train your remote employees?

Why is it important to train your remote employees? In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and brought about a series of unprecedented changes – and challenges – for businesses worldwide. Governments around the world had to enforce lockdowns and other stringent restrictions to stop the spread of the virus, and companies needed to come up with ways to keep their operations going.

Allowing their workforce to work remotely was, no doubt, one of the most successful initiatives that businesses embraced. And while remote working practices were certainly nothing new, it was with the coronavirus pandemic that they became much more popular and widespread across the globe.

When implemented correctly, remote work can generate an array of benefits – but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. One of the main ones is training and developing talent in a setting that is far from traditional – and where a traditional training and development approach wouldn’t work.

This article will discuss the benefits of training and development for remote workers and provide some practical ideas to help you implement your own training and development programs.

The Benefits of Training in the Remote Workplace

Boosting Engagement, Motivation, and Productivity

Being able to access and attend training and development programs is an essential component of employees’ engagement. Through these sessions, remote staff can tap into new, interactive, and compelling ways to participate in their company’s operations.

This, in turn, helps them enhance positive feelings such as motivation, happiness, satisfaction, and, ultimately, generates a boost in their productivity. Happy, fulfilled employees are the lifeblood of a thriving business, and remote training and development opportunities can help your company achieve this.

Creating a Community Feel

Employees’ mental health is another paramount aspect that all business leaders should prioritize. Creating a sense of belonging within a community of like-minded, supportive, and non-judgmental peers is one of the cornerstones of good mental health in the workplace.

But how can you foster this culture, when your employees are all scattered across different locations? Organizing and delivering regular training and development sessions can help.

By combining professional fulfillment with psycho-social well-being, remote staff can feel more involved, valued, and appreciated. The result for business owners? A huge boost in talent retention rates.

Building a Tech-Savvy Remote Workforce

On a more practical note, one of the advantages of running training and development courses for your remote workforce is the ability to teach important technical skills. Your remote workers, in fact, rely on various digital tools and resources in order to perform their daily jobs.

For this reason, offering them frequent, hands-on tech training is a must. Digital-savvy employees know how to handle everything – from customer service to financials, from logistics to marketing – in a fast, expert, and secure way, which adds value to your business.

But there’s more. Allowing remote employees who are located in different geographies and time zones access to digital tools whenever they need them also increases their flexibility and autonomy, improving their performance.

The role of technology in developing remote teams is, therefore, a pivotal one. This is particularly true if your company heavily employs demographics such as Millennials and Gen Z. These categories, in fact, see technology almost like “air”: a fundamental part of their daily lives and, as such, of their job.

The Best Ways to Train Your Remote Employees

Offer Micro Courses

Because training and development programs are such crucial aspects of a thriving workplace, they need to ensure maximum focus, involvement, and commitment from participating staff. This, though, is not always easy to achieve – especially when a company is offering virtual courses.

For this reason, it’s best to keep training and development initiatives short and sweet. Offering micro-courses, for example, can help you (or the organizer) put together a course more quickly and easily, while allowing your employees to condense their focus in a much shorter time frame.

With microlearning, companies can deliver lessons that are as short as only 5 minutes a day. This has been shown to boost attention, commitment, and retention, with benefits that continue to show in the long term.

Make Training Mobile-Friendly

Most employees who work remotely do so from their home office or another location where they can access digital business tools and platforms from their laptops. Increasingly, though, remote workers are opting to use mobile devices to perform some of their daily tasks.

Therefore, if you want your remote training to be successful, you need it to be optimized for mobile access. By offering mobile-friendly coaching or training, you will see learner participation and completion rates soar, as well as a significant uptick in engagement, flexibility, and independent learning.

Promote a Self-Paced Learning Approach

On the topic of independent learning, another issue you want to tackle when creating your training course is its learning pace. Asynchronous learning – more commonly known as self-paced learning – is the way to go.

This is a self-directed learning method that offers employees the opportunity to attend and complete the course at their own speed and according to their individual learning preferences. Not enforcing strict deadlines can also help to enhance that work-life balance that remote workers appreciate so much, as it takes some of the pressure off while still offering valuable content and knowledge that can truly make a difference to your employees’ lives.

Adopt Interactive Training Methods

Remote training doesn’t need to only include PowerPoint presentations and Zoom conference calls. In fact, making your training programs as interactive and captivating as possible can dramatically boost their uptake and success.

So, why not explore exciting new avenues such as gamification and live webinars? By making learning fun, interactive, and personalized, you can ensure that your remote employees keep feeling part of a professional community that values and supports them, wherever in the world they may be.

Boost Your Remote Learning and Development Initiatives with Impro

At Impro, we are passionate about harnessing the power of AI and data science to help your company train your remote workforce – from your newest hires to your most senior team members. We have developed an innovative online platform that enables you to mentor your team with smart data & guidance from the experts of ImproAI, only in 5 minutes a day.

Learn more about Impro and what we can do for you by visiting our website – and let us know what you think!

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