With companies moving increasingly to remote and at-home working practices, and the long-term consequences of recent events looking to extend for months if not years, it’s time to re-evaluate how many aspects of business function. One of the tasks you may need to do during this time is to ensure your staff are fully trained in various aspects of their work. Ordinarily, you might gather everyone into a conference room, perhaps run a few presentations and then activities to test their ability to work together and solve problems. In many ways, training days can function partly as team-building exercises if they are run effectively. But how can you translate this into a digital version that works for all your employees working at home?

Regular Breaks

If there is one thing we have learned over the past few months, it is that people can find it much harder to concentrate when sat at their computer screens without the interactivity of an office environment. This is particularly true for training sessions, and playing hours of online presentations at your employees back-to-back will result in poor absorption of the information. Make sure that you are scheduling breaks into the day even more regularly than usual, allowing people time to make themselves a cup of tea and stretch their legs, before returning to focus on their training.

Follow Up 

Even if you can maximize the amount your employees are able to take in, it’s a good idea to offer follow up resources for important information which they can peruse at their own leisure. You can link to this during presentations using URLs, clickable links, or even a QR code generator so that employees are able to access it in a variety of ways. Providing this will allow the training to bed in even further, and give your staff the ability to take control of their own learning in the future.

Keep It Fun!

Just because you aren’t all in a room together doesn’t mean you have to resort to a series of presentations without any engagement or practical applications. It might be a good idea to hold a discussion via a video platform where employees can engage with each other about the topics, and make sure everyone is on the same page rather than just sending the information out into the void. There are also plenty of websites around where you can engage your employees with training exercises that simulate a lived experience. Some will even allow you to commission interactive activities for a specific purpose – whilst this comes with a budget, it is an invaluable way to engage employees remotely in complex tasks.

Ask For Feedback

If you are running your first remote training session, make sure to keep the lines of communication with your staff open and available, so they can share any feedback or suggestions – anonymously if possible. This may be a very new way of working for you all, so there’s no shame in asking participants to share their experiences, helping you to improve how the training runs for future groups.