Far Away, But Well-Trained – 6 Training Tips For Your Remote Teams

By: Karen Spencer, Area Vice President, OrasiLabs Product Manager

Businesses today are working with a workforce that is geographically diverse. The office has moved beyond the physical perimeter of a cubicle, and employees have tapped the advantages of flexible work options in the last year. The network and operational support that companies have put in place has indeed been remarkable and unprecedented. Remote work is a growing trend penetrating deep and wide.

GitHub’s recent report supports this trend’s new shape and direction:

• All-remote: The purest form of remote work, where each team member is on a level playing field.
• 43 percent of remote workers feel it is essential to work for a company where all employees are remote.
• Over 1 in 4 respondents shared they belong to an all-remote organization, with no offices, embracing asynchronous workflows, and each employee working in their native time zone.
• An added 12 percent work all-remote with each employee synched to a company-mandated time zone.
• 86 percent of respondents believed remote work is the future, and 84 percent showed they can accomplish all their tasks remotely right now.

But there is still one factor that can be a cause of worry to employers with this workforce.

How can you ensure that employees are up to date with the latest developments? How can you enhance their skills while giving them the comfort of flexibility and convenience?

Gaps and questions with remote teams

A McKinsey analysis on the topic unveils that the potential for remote work is highly concentrated among highly skilled, highly educated workers, and it is still limited to a handful of industries, occupations, and geographies.

Now, you may ask yourself – can you keep your remote teams well-trained without the costs and hassles? Yes, you can with these simple tips.

6 Tips for strengthening remote teams through effective training:

1. Do not forget engagement. Zoom fatigue and unstructured work routines have emerged as significant problem areas in remote work. It is easy for employees to tune out during another Zoom meeting. So, give them hands-on practice sessions that are well-punctuated with real scenario activities that make learning fun, engaging and improve knowledge retention.

2. Design training programs with attention to specific needs and gaps. The power of virtual capabilities enables you to cater to individual improvement areas of employees. Not every employee is in the same place – geographically and skill wise. So, their training gaps and requirements would also differ significantly. Use advanced features of intelligent virtual training tools and optimize your training with some new-age design strengths.

3. Smart Scheduling. The flip side of working from anywhere is that people can often be working around the clock. One team member may be busy with an urgent, time sensitive task, while a colleague may have the bandwidth available for training. Hence, you can use the self-paced training features and the simplicity of scheduling today’s virtual training solutions to train effectively despite these time management issues.

4. Encourage collaboration and active participation. Good virtual solutions have introduced a lot of space for trainees to try out various applications. They can use peer-to-peer discussions, hands-on assignments, and close-encounters with real-life scenario-mapping to ensure that what they learn has a lasting impact. Use these features and inculcate collaborative energy in your sessions.

5. Measure and monitor your sessions – both ways. A host of features gives the possibility of over-the-shoulder visibility and a close watch on a learner’s actual progress. This brings instructors and learners in virtual proximity and allows for granular monitoring of the training progress. This is going to be very helpful in increasing the training effectiveness and in minimizing resource waste.

6. Cloud is here – tap into it. The best part about virtual solutions and cloud-driven training labs is you do not need to spend unnecessary costs in physical set-ups or scalability barriers. Just spin your solution to the scale and depth of training needs that you require. Leverage it to train anyone, anywhere, and anytime.

Modern-day training labs are turning into a substantial advantage for enterprises who use them right. These are powerful options to enhance the productivity and skill-levels of your remote teams. Wherever they are, they are up and running – just like your training.