As the whole world moves to a digitized medium, virtual employee training is becoming more and more common. Demand for employer-provided, high-quality, remote training sessions is growing with every passing day.
The primary challenge faced by any virtual employee training strategy is to keep the trainees interested, participative, and engaged. In this article, we are going to look at 10 of the best virtual employee training strategies that are bound to improve your workplace productivity, strengthen the bonds of your teams, and consequently highly improve the chances of upward mobility.
1. Focus on incorporating training as an integral part of your company culture
If we take a quick glance at LinkedIn’s list of ‘The Top Skills Companies Need Most’ we will see that the list of 2018 and the list of 2022 bear little to no resemblance. This shows the massive shift in trends that have happened over the past few years. To keep up with this, companies need to actively inspire their employees to upskill themselves with relevant skillsets. There are 5 steps a company can take to initiate this process.
- Incorporate a learning culture into the principles of your organization.
- Hire inquisitive candidates with a penchant for learning.
- Use training as the primary method to inculcate company-specific policies, goals, and values.
- Encourage the dissipation of employee knowledge and expertise across departments and teams.
- Provide time and resources to remote employees for pursuing requisite training programs.
2. Encourage and initiate product learning
Remote work is distributed in nature, with employees spanning across a vast geographical location. A lot of hardware and software is used to make it possible for remote employees to fulfill their designated job responsibilities. The incorporation of product knowledge training would keep these employees up to date with the latest technologies available in the market that would aid them in carrying out their job responsibilities.
Every time a company launches a new product, a mandatory product learning training course should be carried out to help employees familiarize themselves with the product. Apart from this, a quarterly, half-yearly, or annual technology review session can also prove to be quite fruitful. This would help employees address their concerns, review upcoming updates of both hardware and software, discuss upcoming changes that might potentially affect workflow, and troubleshoot errors.
3. Host debriefing sessions once training gets over
It is imperative for any organization to successfully complete training programs. And this can only happen if all the employees in the program get to fully understand the target of the training program. To fulfill this, organizations should host debriefing sessions afterward to allow for doubt clearance, follow-up questions, and a recap of what the training program was about. If you wish to hire a dedicated virtual employee, you will have to provide ample opportunities for the employee to upskill themselves to keep up with the latest trending skills.
4. Keep track of productivity and progress of training sessions
Tracking the productivity and progress of a training session is of paramount importance for the management of any organization. If employee training is tracked properly, it promotes organizational growth, logs employee participation, gauges the participation in training, follows the learning progress of employees, and analyzes the participation of employees in the training programs.
5. Solicit feedback from employees regarding training
Qualtric conducted a survey titled ‘2020 Global Employee Experience Trends’ which found out workplaces that ask for employee feedback have a 59% employee engagement rate compared to a 42% engagement rate of workplaces that do not ask for employee feedback. The same Qualtric report found that companies that actively work on turning employee feedback into actionable plans enjoy an 80% employee engagement rate.
6. Constantly evolve your virtual employee training strategy
Innovation is essential in helping a company evolve its virtual employee training strategy. There are 4 key practices that a company can follow to instigate innovative ideas.
- Hire a remote consultant to ensure a remote perspective on your virtual employee training procedures
- Keep an eye out for training initiatives undertaken by your competitors. Try and implement the latest remote employee trends in your employee training strategy as well.
- Focus on well-documented methods like peer-to-peer mentoring, video lectures, e-courses, instructor-led coaching sessions et al. to boost your team bonding and upskill your employees.
- Provide access to online professional development programs to your employees to help them gain a better understanding of the latest trends in the industry.
7. Inculcate managerial buy-in
The old saying, “An army is as good as the General” is highly relevant in this context. Enthusiastic responses to training programs by managerial staff would encourage employees to put genuine effort into training programs. Performance bonuses, equipment upgrades, care packages, and charitable awards can include in the promo to encourage managers to volunteer to host training programs. And no one can encourage a team better than their own manager.
8. Base the training programs on a conversational tone
Training programs are supposed to help employees upskill themselves. A conversational approach with ample participant acknowledgment will go a long way in infusing interest amongst employees regarding the training program. Asking for responses every few minutes, clearing doubts along the way, and talking to participants via their names will incorporate a sense of conversation into the employees which will lead to an increase in the effectiveness of the training session.
9. Clearly outline the expectations of a training program from beforehand
While a training program in itself always has an end goal, it is not always limited to that. There can be a lot of takeaways for employees from a particular training session apart from the evident ones. So, before starting off a training program, provide participants with a detailed outline of the training goals. It will help employees grasp the training better as there will be a set expectation on their part.
10. Use interactive techniques to keep the participants engaged
Keeping the participants engaged in the training program is of paramount importance. So every once in a while you can introduce an activity that would require employees to actively participate. This will not only keep the employees’ attention from veering wayward but also grow a personal stake in the program.
Wrapping up
An interactive virtual employee training strategy is the need of the hour for any organization with a large base of remote workers. If you wish to hire a dedicated virtual employee, it is imperative that apart from the basic work environment requirements. You supply the employee with ample chances to get on with the latest trends and upskill themselves.
Therefore, If you wish to initiate a conversation with us regarding this, you are most welcome to contact us…