Training Best Practices to Engage Your Remote Workforce

Courtesy of Yeo & Yeo

Maintaining training standards is certainly a key piece of a successful remote workforce, and as the pandemic continues to impact the number of employees working from home (with some working there permanently), many organizations have questioned their approach to training.

A new perspective provides a shift to more employee-centric training programs that help to maintain healthy organizational culture. Here are some tips to make your training more engaging and useful for remote workers.

Many organizations have delivered online training regularly for a decade (or more). However, the concept of loading up 45 minutes to 2 hours of training content for a remote employee is becoming less and less the norm. Many organizations have decided that breaking up the training into smaller chunks that don’t overwhelm employees and providing more frequent training is the way to go. This “bite-sized” approach makes running the training program easier and is better received by all business units.

Consider rolling out training or communication to the masses as a “video module” rather than large meetings in Zoom or Teams to allow people to watch when it makes the most sense for their professional and personal schedules. This helps to avoid “Zoom fatigue” that many workers are experiencing by having more control of exactly when to consume.

In this world of using a smartphone to make videos, you can easily break up the email and virtual meeting doldrums by mixing in videos into training campaigns. This provides the advantage of being able to track who has watched the training in its entirety. Remember, though, keep it short and to the point. 

Don’t “lock” your training modules. Sometimes people call these “non-skip” versions of courses. In these courses, all the controls are locked, preventing the employee from moving freely between screens. This is an attempt to force attention, even if they know the content and could move faster. 

Making courses “non-skippable” is an ineffective way to promote culture and can make your training feel more like torture. Research on autonomy and adult learning shows that if you want your users to really learn, you need to treat them like adults. They will find a way around a locked module anyway if they are not motivated. 

Finally, if you don’t have surveys and comments enabled on your content or you’re not reviewing those to help with your plan, you should start right away. 

When reading comments and reviews, don’t take them personally. Try to see them from a scientific perspective. Read all the comments, compare the ratings to other programs, and look for progress and trends.

We hope these tips will help you as you work to build a solid training program for your organization.