How to Keep Your Remote Employees Learning

Continuous learning in the workplace is critical. The benefits of continuous training as discussed by Chron include expanding your employees’ knowledge, addressing their weaknesses (and even turning them into strengths), and increasing employee satisfaction. Consequently, all this is bound to increase your employees’ confidence and enhance their engagement. And as discussed previously in our post Why Is Employee Engagement Important at the Workplace?, we noted how engaged employees are the best kind, as they are generally more motivated and happier. All this, in turn, can lead to improved on-the-job performance — to the benefit of your organisation’s bottom line and standing in the industry.

Problem is, offering continuous learning has gotten more complicated due to the normalisation of remote work. Due to the pandemic, many organisations had no choice to switch to a remote set up, in an effort to follow government mandates and to protect their employees as well. But a big reason this work-from-home paradigm complicates employee development is that it makes it difficult to gather employees together for a learning session. Another reason is the lack of immediate feedback and correction, which is far easier with onsite working setups.

But given the importance of employee learning and development, it is imperative that you come up with ways to keep your remote team learning. The ideas below will help you do just that. Take a look:

Leverage all available technologies

While you can’t gather your team in the same physical space for learning sessions, you can always organise virtual training sessions and workshops via videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom. Better yet, you can adopt for your organisation its own learning management software (LMS) where you can upload job-learning courses, training manuals, and similar educational materials on the cloud. In turn, your employees can access these learning materials asynchronously, or whenever they have time for some self-study. By using a variety of technologies to impart knowledge, you’ll be giving your team more avenues to learn a range of skills.

Establish a wellbeing enhancement program

While employees need to learn more about job-related skills, it is equally important that they learn to take better care of themselves in order to stay healthy, minimise sick days and improve productivity. A great way to ensure this is by instituting a wellness program that must include vital components. As outlined by Pain Free Working these components include offering perks that impact everyone, allowing a high degree of personalisation in the workspace through flexible scheduling, and promoting holistic health. It’s the kind of program being implemented in, for example, Ernst & Young, which offers personalised life coaching, private healthcare, gym membership discounts, and flexible working hours. Through this program, your staff will learn the good practices in self-care, and these will help keep them healthy and productive in the long term.

Tap into your team’s creative side

Again, you needn’t limit learning to job-related skills only. So, aside from teaching your team about self-care, consider teaching them ways to optimise their right-brain functions, as doing so would enhance their creativity, imagination, and visualisation — three qualities that would allow them to be more productive and be better problem solvers. You don’t even have to concoct anything special to get your team doing brain exercises. In fact, something as simple as a virtual creative project would suffice. In such an initiative, you can ask your remote staff to create doodles in a virtual chatroom, thereby giving them an avenue to synchronously work on their right-brain functions while staying engaged with the team. The result will be a more creative, imaginative and engaged workforce.

Partner with TalenTeam

In case you didn’t know yet, we at TalenTeam offer a range of solutions whose aim is to improve employee engagement. One such solution is our SuccessFactors Training that makes software learning fun and easy. Our training programs are also personalised and customisable, thereby giving your team a better chance of learning digital skills that can make them better and more productive employees. We at TalenTeam even offer dedicated admin training, where a core group is given advanced training so they can then help out in teaching the rest of the team. As such, your team is all but guaranteed to add digital skills to their arsenal.

Submitted by Riley Hayward for  talenteam.com