Over 70% of full-time US workers are working from home these days. In that situation, it is very difficult to keep everybody on the same page with training and office culture. So how do you keep your employees up-to-date on learning in that situation in a time when traditional classroom training is no longer an option?
In this article, we explain how you can change your learning and development programs to account for a hybrid or even fully remote workforce.
There are several barriers to productivity when remote, such as extra meetings or at-home interruptions. Keep these in mind when developing your remote training.
If your trainers will be in the office while everybody learning will be at home, that opens up the opportunity to create a space for teaching. You can convert a meeting room into somewhere you can broadcast digital workplace learning from. It can also act as a collaborative space for those still in the office.
As fewer workers will be in the office, it is likely you can find a space that matches this need - just take over that old corner conference that everyone used to use for naps :)
Alternatively, you can take what once was synchronous, real-time training and make it asynchronous. Research has shown how effective microlearning is. If your content can be broken up (hint: more than likely it can), leveraging automated tools like that to make training more accessible can save you hours of stress and time.
As business leaders, we tend to pour over sales data, employee survey metrics, and similar dashboards monitoring various KPIs across the company. But what are you reviewing about your workplace learning stats? If you’re not measuring it, can you really expect change? Measuring training effectiveness starts with knowing what KPIs to track, and we made a handy little checklist to help you get started or assess your current training measurement efforts.
We know that formal learning only makes up 10% of what an employee learns, so how are you planning for the experiential and social learning elements in a remote environment? Your programs need to move with your learners, even if they’re mostly sitting behind a computer at home! Learners need to be able to get their experiential and social learning without any friction - which means make it mobile, make it asynchronous, and make it fun. Sorry technophobes, this is one area where technology is important to do it well. Employees need to enjoy the experiential and social elements of learning, and that starts with making it easy for them.
There are three core areas to help those learning from home feel as validated as those in the office. Make sure to appeal to each of them or you will feel your remote learners slipping. They are:
Well-Being: During the pandemic, we spent a lot of time checking in on each other. That shouldn’t stop just because some people are in the office and others aren’t. Learning and well-being go hand-in-hand. Measuring and discussing employee sentiment can help you further personalize learning.
Engagement: Not only should your learners be interacting with you, but they should be engaging in their personalized learning as well. Engage when they show interest in particular topics or apply their learning. This leads to a better employee experience along with better knowledge retention. Authentic recognition is a great starting point to inspiring a culture of learning.
Feedback: Giving valid feedback can stop someone from thinking the task is a box-ticking exercise. It can instead drive them to believe you care about their growth and development. Make sure your feedback follows the SMART tenets, and they should see you as actually wanting to help.
There’s no magic bullet to remote training. The common theme amongst all the points above is being human and balanced enough to understand your learners, and personalizing your initiatives enough to meet them where they’re at.
We are ready to help you scale personalized learning, so just reach out if we can help.