Virtual Labs: Changing the Future of Work

Productivity, Collaboration, and Commitment. Find out how virtual labs can solve problems of remote work arrangement. 

The idea of invisible employees may have sounded unreal in the pre-COVID period, but today it is a reality. Businesses have started adapting and grooming their employees for remote work. 

A recent Gartner poll shows that 48 percent of employees will likely work remotely at least part- time after COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, only 30 percent of employees worked remotely.  

The Crisis Demands Better Training

Remote workers need to be as productive as the pre-COVID world to adequately serve customers and deliver experiences that align with the pandemic-driven needs. To do so, they need some support from their leaders too.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology examines the impact of professional isolation on teleworker job performance and turnover intentions. 

The findings pointed out that the negative impact of professional isolation on job performance is greater for those who spend extensive time teleworking while engaging in limited face-to-face interaction.  

Although this finding is very telling about job performance, it also provides important lessons for organizations. 

While people involved in working remotely may not immediately leave work because they feel disengaged or irrelevant, the loyalty they have is not enough to bet upon. It was observed that teleworkers maintain a high level of continuance commitment, rather than affective commitment.

But what is more worrying? 

Due to greater professional isolation, remote workers can show a tendency to lose faith in their skills and knowledge and in their ability to find alternative employment. The pre-COVID period never faced these issues in such stark contrast. The training was well-structured, scheduled across calendars, and always physical. Now, virtual training alternatives have to take precedence. Developing employees is not only a matter of imparting them with skills, but also a way of continuing engagement and association. Effective virtual training solutions like virtual labs help achieve this. 

How are virtual labs changing the future of work?

1. Collaborative work: Virtual training is user-friendly. It aligns the expectations, goals and constraints of the learner and instructor. The balanced approach allows space for collaboration and enriches training sessions.
2. On the cloud and flexible: Instructors can design virtual sessions with far more precision, depth, and flexibility than what they could afford in a physical context. The tools, features and elasticity of cloud training environments make the entire life cycle of training interventions cost-effective and time-effective.
3. Independent of time and size: Virtual labs are simple to administer. They can be conducted at any time, any location, and for any size of the organization.
4. Create a sense of togetherness: These virtual training sessions bring visual cues, engagement intersections, and ways to create ‘mutual knowledge’ among coworkers which encourages faster learning curves. However, a strong upshot is a way it cuts down on the sense of isolation among teams.
5. Multiple outcomes: Virtual training solutions help organizations achieve multi-pronged outcomes.
   1. They can keep up-skilling and developing remote workers for their current and future roles.
   2. They can keep the teams bonded and on the same page.
   3. Make sure managers are getting resources that are up-to-the-mark.
   4. Keep employees happy, excited, hopeful, secure and connected.
6. Test real-life use cases: Virtual labs can fill the gaps in traditional training methods. They can generate creative elements, make space for real-time feedback and re-design, help learners to self-pace the sessions, and do all this without breaking the system. Ultimately, it enables faster testing of use-case scenarios.

Also Read: Virtual Labs: The Pillar of Next-Gen Remote Working

Remote work is not a temporary phase. It is a new paradigm that will stay indefinitely. As organizations train employees on business continuity in these tough times and invest in technology, applications, and cloud models, they need support from partners who can impart critical skills. These virtual training solutions do that without any delays, expensive fine-print, or deployment struggles. 

Get smarter with remote work. Embrace a good tool and ride the crisis.