Remote Workers Training Guide: 8 Tips to Empower Remote Teams

The remote work model is not new anymore. A Forbes article projects that 25% of professional jobs will turn remote by 2022 in North America, and the number will only increase in 2023.

Remote work is quite an effective work model for modern companies. After surveying 10,000 employees, the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics stated that employees were equally productive working from home compared to the office.

But this doesn’t mean setting up a remote team is an easy task. There are several new challenges that managers have to deal with in order to establish a smooth remote workflow. Here, remote worker training is one of the biggest challenges.

In the TalentLMS survey, 67% of the workforce says they want better remote training to understand their job role and improve their performance. 

But, what is remote worker training, and why is it different from traditional training?

Let’s move ahead to understand the remote work training concept in-depth. 

What Is Remote Training?

As the name suggests, remote training is a virtual employee training program that takes place at a distance. It is a part of the employee learning and development process.

Remote worker training is delivered using different virtual learning modes like videos, webinars, online courses, and more. The companies can create mainly three types of remote training models:

• Synchronous learning activities where all participants learn together. 
• Asynchronous learning allows participants to access learning materials and study at their own pace. 
• Blended learning is an amalgamation of both synchronous and asynchronous learning. Organizations can customize a training program using synchronous and asynchronous learning elements. 

Why Is Remote Worker Training Essential Today?

Lack of proper training can create huge chaos in the workplace. It can give birth to miscommunication, team conflicts, latency, and poor productivity in the organization. And in a remote work setup, where employees and employers already have physical barriers between them, poor work training can create a deeper problem.

Therefore, remote worker training is highly essential to:

Streamline communication 

Training programs allow workers and managers to connect and form strong bonds. Employees can interact with peers during training workshops and better understand company goals. This helps remote employees to know their role in the organization.  

Provide tech support 

Every company uses different business automation tools today. For instance, many companies use modern sales CRM solutions to manage their customers and employees. In fact, some use employee tracking, communication, and even customized solutions to run workflow smoothly.

Therefore, proper tech remote training can help you demonstrate all your business automation tools to your remote workers. Also, you can teach them some methods to use tools to enhance remote work productivity. 

Build a community 

According to the European Foundation report, 41% of remote workers are more stressed than their counterparts. All the isolation and non-existing social life can make remote employees more depressed and alone. Eventually, stress and anxiety will impact the productivity and performance of remote workers.

Therefore, companies need to organize frequent virtual training workshops and meetings to ensure their employees feel connected, not alone. Your remote employees can’t meet daily for lunch, but you can offer them Zoom brainstorming sessions every Friday to interact with one another. 

Familiarize with your company culture 

Every company follows a certain culture and social conduct. Therefore, when you provide training to your new remote workers, they can better familiarize themselves with your company culture.

They can better understand what type of behavior is appropriate in your organization and how you want them to interact with customers or other business associates. Therefore, it is important for your business reputation to provide basic company cultural training to your employees.

Quick 8 Tips to Provide Your Remote Workers Training 

Remote training is a distance training system conducted using different technologies. In this, trainers have no direct interaction with trainees, unlike traditional training approaches. Thus, it becomes harder for trainers to provide the right training to employees, enhancing their productivity and efficiency.

However, here are a few quick tips that you can use to provide effective remote training to your workers:

1. Multiple learning formats 

The best remote training approach provides multiple learning formats to your employees. That’s because every person learns differently. For example, some learn better when they see things, and some prefer to learn at their own pace.

Therefore, you should customize remote workers’ training modules with Q/A sessions, webinars, live training, and other learning methods.

Suppose you want to provide training on a company’s new accounting software to your remote employees. In that case, you can steal some content marketing styles to create a comprehensive training program for them, like how-to blogs, video tutorials, and live training via webinars.

This way, all your employees can learn using the suitable learning method. Plus, it will help you understand which learning format is more preferred by your remote team.

2. Create interactive social groups 

Employee training is a continuous process. You can’t simply provide onboarding training to your employees once and after that; never share any new piece of information with them. Training doesn’t work this way.

You have to constantly create new learning materials and share them with your employees to improve their performance. For this, you can create interactive social groups using tools like Asana, Slack, Trello, and others.

This training approach will help you motivate your remote workers to learn new things. You can also create a peer learning environment in your organization where employees can exchange new learning materials and courses.

For example, if your one employee has read an informative article on account-based marketing, she can share it with the rest of the team via communication groups. You don’t even need to create training material this way, as your employees will self-teach themselves by finding different resources online.

Moreover, you should integrate different communication tools so that your employees can collaborate using different methods. For instance, you can integrate a company’s call center with your employee’s numbers so they can have quick phone conversations anytime. 

3. Break your lessons 

Nobody likes to sit for an hour in a virtual meeting. It will become boring and monotonous for your employees if you provide long training sessions to them.

Therefore, you should break your remote worker training program into bite-size sessions. Smaller training lessons are easy to digest and understand. When your employees see that you have a hundred pages of the company manual, they will even fear to read it.

So, break your hefty training sessions into small chunks. To get an idea, you can check out Canva Design School videos. They have broken long tutorial videos into short episodes that you can watch anytime and anywhere.

4. Respect remote workers’ schedule

Remote work has already eliminated differences between personal and professional life. However, employees are still learning a way to balance their personal and professional life in a remote work setup.

In this, if you organize prompt remote work training sessions for your employees, this will only annoy them. So, you should respect your employee’s schedules while providing them training.

If you have created self-training videos or blogs for your remote employees, scheduling will not be much of an issue for you. However, scheduling might be a big issue if you have to provide live training and demonstration to your staff.

Thanks to scheduling tools like Bookafy, you can easily create a training schedule for your entire remote. In addition, the software will allow you to set reminders, automated calendar sync, and more. 

5. Use a buddy program 

Once you provide live training to your remote employees, they might have some questions or doubts.

If you start taking each employee’s question during the training session, your entire training time will be spent on it. You will not be able to teach anything valuable to your remote workers.

So, to avoid this problem, you can adopt a buddy program in your organization. Under this program, you can pair one new and current employee with one another. This way, existing employees can help your new remote employees to settle in and clean all their doubts.

6. Make small groups 

To make your remote training more efficient and progressive, you should create groups of a few people. When you have fewer people to train at a point, you can focus more on their needs and learning capabilities.

You can divide training groups based on different personal factors such as time zone, age, intellectual intelligence, etc.

Creating a small group of like-minded individuals will give you the advantage of creating learning material suitable for the whole group.

For example, if your one learning group contains freshers only, you can create a simple and basic training program for them. On the contrary, you can create advanced training programs for professional groups. 

7. Make it fun

If you don’t want people to fall asleep during your training sessions, you must make your lessons fun. However, since virtually, you don’t have the advantage of establishing a personal connection with your trainees. Thus, you have to use innovative ways to make training attractive for your team.

You can use games, surveys, polls, and other visual training methods to make remote training fun. 

8. Frequently monitor progress 

Training is incomplete without frequent progress monitoring. When you don’t monitor your trainee’s progress, you won’t understand whether your team accepts your lessons or not.

Knowing the real-time progress will help you make instant changes in your training program. Traditionally, trainers used to take exams or test students’ skills at the end of training programs. But, this method is not effective in remote workers’ training.

In remote training, you should frequently ask questions from your team members. You can also send them surveys and questionnaires after the webinar session. This will tell you how much information your team has understood during the training. And this will give you a chance to make changes in your training program if the results are not as per your expectations. 

Let’s Start Your Remote Workers Training Today! 

If you don’t have a proper remote worker training module in your organization, set it today. Training is essential to make your team productive, progressive, and efficient in a remote work environment.

Remote training programs are a two-way communication street. They allow employees and employers to better understand each other. You can eliminate all the physical barriers with the help of proper remote training.

So, we have already shared 8 amazing tips to create an effective remote worker training program in your workplace. Now, go and get started with training today!