How to Make Training Remote Employees Easy

Want to succeed training remote employees?

How should you conduct training for remote employees? Which software tools will you use? When and how often should you be training employees that are remote? What does the learning process look like?

Training remote employees requires patience, practice, and tools that can support the process. Training content should be accessible online. In addition, you might consider how much time you want remote employees doing training, and where those remote employees will get their practice and reinforcement.

What helps with remote training?

• Accountability
• Content availability
• Connection to peers
• Searchable knowledge
• Software that enforces learning
• Time invested to make training work

Accountability is key for training remote employees

Hold remote employees accountable to learning training material

Accountability in remote training comes into question quickly. How will you make sure remote employees learn? What systems in your training process hold them accountable to absorbing the information? Are you able to see their individual engagement? Are they actually watching the videos? How will you keep them engaged and quickly distribute what they need to know?

Since remote employees will move at their own pace more than ever, it’s easy to feel out of control. Finding software solutions that hold remote employees accountable is important. Consistency is too. Remote employees should be held accountable to learning and remembering what they are asked to know. This becomes even more important since employees are not physically present in the office where it’s easier to tell if they know their stuff or not.

Remote employee training content

Make content available and discoverable for remote employees

What used to be done in person moves online with remote employee training. In many cases, this isn’t much of a change, and in other businesses it’s significant. Whether your company is new to digital and online training content or not, it’s important to have a process and system in place that always directs remote employees where they need to go to learn more.

Remote employees get used to finding and referencing the information they need regularly. Information way finding replaces leaning over and asking a coworker a question in the office. When employees are remote it’s easy to direct them to all content online. This includes private internal content, and publicly accessible content too.

Connect remote employees to coworkers and peers

Remote employees will need to feel a greater sense of connection

Remote and non-remote employees should always be connected. An always on chat tool lets employees know and see “who’s there”. This doesn’t mean that these chat tools are the place to do training, or look up knowledge. They are there for in the moment connection and conversation. There are multiple ways to help your remote workers feel connected.

Make knowledge searchable for remote employees

Employees who are remote rely on searchable knowledge

Remote employees need to know where to go to find the knowledge they need. They want a place where they can start there search and then go from there. It’s not realistic for every bit of data, information, or knowledge to live in a single place. Lots of companies strive for this, however, it’s often unsuccessful. What can work is having a single place to search. A place where remote employees can go to find the answers they are looking for. In addition, this place can direct or link to other places remote employees may need to go for training content.

Use software that’s designed to enforce learning

Set expectations with solutions that hold employees accountable

Content is everywhere. Documents, games, PDFs, videos, they all exist. However, there’s a real hidden question that doesn’t care about the format of your content: How do you make sure employees know what you need them to over time? It’s easy to hold people accountable to knowing in the office, but it’s much harder with remote employees. Humans forget things over time, and when someones presence is missing to hold you accountable, it’s easier to forget. This is why we need software that helps employees remember, so they don’t forget what they need to know.

How much time will all this take?

Some software solutions could end up taking lots of everyone’s time

How much time will you have to invest to make training remote employees work in your company? With so many tasks to possibly do, this turns into a big question fast. There’s software setup, filling software up with content, designing courses and lessons, learning from the subject matter experts, training remote employees on how to use the software, supporting the software and more. On top of it all, you might want to get started right now. Software solutions that grow with you and help you start training employees immediately become very valuable.

Training remote employees can be easy

You just have to make sure you…

• Choose software that is easy to use, works fast, and doesn’t take time
• Hold remote employees accountable to knowing and enforce learning
• Provide a place where remote employees can search for more
• Connect everyone and keep all employees on the same page