tips, COVID-19, remote training

Remote Training Best Practices: 3 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement

by Debbie Williams

Eighty-eight percent of businesses globally either mandated or encouraged their full workforce to work from home as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, reported a contributor to Review 42.1  “Furthermore, about 97% of the organizations immediately canceled all work-related travel,” this source stated. It’s vital that workers are offered high-quality remote training that engages them, helps them retain information, and ensures they are appropriately skilled. 

Regardless of where it takes place, training increases employee productivity, engagement, and retention, as well as promotes a healthy bottom line for companies, per Entrepreneur Magazine.2 Business leaders can see that remote workers are well-trained and have the skills they need to be successful in their roles by implementing several best practices for online employee training.

Check out our comprehensive list of helpful COVID-19 eLearning resources

Remote Training Best Practices: 3 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement

3 best practices your company can implement
for successful remote training

The list of best practices for quality remote training is lengthy and varies from company to company. Here are a few things you should keep in mind as you refine your organization’s best practices for remote training:

1. Encourage learners to take virtual training as seriously as in-person training

There can be a temptation to not take remote training as seriously as in-person training since remote training sessions often have a more relaxed feel. However, to engage learners it’s critical to start and end real-time virtual training events on time, as you would with in-person events. Setting this precedent will help remote employees remember that their timely participation is expected. Also, training sessions and events should take place within regular business hours. You may find that virtual training events are most successful when their guidelines are similar to those for live training events.

Related Reading: How to Design Engaging eLearning Content

Remote Training in the Age of Coronavirus eBook

2. Virtual training sessions should include interactive elements

Do your remote learners seem checked out of online training? If so, you must engage them quickly and create learning experiences that interest them. Otherwise, you will not get a good ROI for your training investment and your remote employees may not participate in remote training as needed to remain upskilled. Whether real-time or on-demand, online training is much more engaging when it is interactive. Adding games, assessments, quizzes, and simulations to online learning is a great practice to adopt to promote better training for remote employees. 

Related reading: Cost-Effective Ways to Make Corporate Online Learning More Interactive and Fun

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3.Offer continuous learning opportunities to drive results

Most employees want more training and learning opportunities. “Roughly 86% of employees say that job training is important to them—and nearly three out of every four (74%) are willing to learn things outside of work hours to improve their job performance,” stated Curiosity at Work.3 By offering more continuous learning options to remote workers, you’ll meet their training needs and help increase their fulfillment at work. Make creating more training opportunities a priority, even during the current global health crisis, to drive employee satisfaction and better training results

Related Reading: How to Set Up a Successful Remote Training Program

An LMS can help you connect
virtual learners with others

One of the primary challenges remote training presents is social isolation and learner disengagement. To combat this, use your learning management system’s social learning tools to connect virtual learners with their supervisors and peers. LMS social learning features such as online communities, learner forums, accelerated content curation and knowledge sharing, calendaring, and web conferencing make this possible by giving your L&D team members the resources they need to connect remote learners with others.

LMS software makes the process of creating a successful remote training program straightforward. Request a demo of TOPYX LMS to find out how it can help your organization create, deliver, track, and report on remote training in ways that get the training results you want.

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Sources:
[1] https://review42.com/remote-work-statisticshttps://review42.com/remote-work-statistics/
[2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/340997
[3] https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/why-employees-crave-more-training-and-how-employers-arent-delivering-it/#:~:text=Roughly%2086%25%20of%20employees%20say,to%20improve%20their%20job%20performance.

Debbie Williams

Debbie Williams

Director, Marketing