Closing an office meant the death of business just some years ago, now it means development. The survey at the beginning of 2020 showed that around 85% of employees worldwide work remotely at least once a week and their amount grew daily. However, the global shutdown caused by COVID-19 forced the entire world to find their feet in a new reality.
It made millions of organizations adopt a distant working mode and cope with the challenge of managing a remote team with almost no lead-time. We have already written about the benefits and development peculiarities of project management tools for overseas teams. However, the challenge was complicated with the necessity to get remote employees onboarded and trained, on the one hand, and engage the existing specialists into the activities to enhance their professional skills and expertize, on the other.
In most cases, people working from home demonstrated little motivation to learn something new, devoting their time to things more prosaic. That’s why our article today is about distant teams training.
Due to the situation in the world business owners started to look for effective ways of coaching remote teams more actively. Even the common remote team tools failed under COVID-19 new reality, since all the usual processes were being completely restructured. It opened prospects to a fresh business stream—e-learning services.
So, let’s take a closer look at this direction.
How to engage a remote team in learning
Needless to say, that direct interaction in the office is quite motivating and for distant employees, the necessity of training is not always obvious. Moreover, there are a number of challenges related to that.
The main of them are multiple distractions, which prevent the trainee from 100% focusing on studies and lack of human interaction, which can be solved through group training. When properly arranged, remote learning can motivate for active engagement and collaboration.
The other difficulties worth mentioning are lack of access to information and technical issues. That brings us to the understanding that for proper remote team engagement e-learning technology content and services should be well-organized, properly designed, easily accessible, and have a good technical infrastructure.
It presupposes a convenient platform, stable connections, appropriate software, intuitive interface, and simple yet effective functionality.
Tips For Effective Training and Managing Your Remote Team
To engage employees in learning is not enough, it’s important to make it efficient. The most effective way to train your staff remotely is to provide an interactive digital solution for the purpose.
There are several aspects to keep in mind when e-learning software development services are considered.
- Make sure your workers have enough technical skills to go through the process. Otherwise, arrange preliminary technology training. If you offer e-learning consulting services, then take care of a proper introduction, guidelines and instructions, to ensure that every person is acquainted with the software, tools, or apps he needs to use in the learning process.
- Communication matters for interaction, integration into the current team, and supervision. So, it is important to provide enough opportunities for it - email, instant messenger, or phone should be integrated with the e-learning product you offer for the purpose.
- Personalization is important since it allows people to move at their own pace. Creating short video instructions and webinars along with other content, which can be mastered at a convenient time, revised and refreshed in mind, allows to make the training process flexible and convenient.
- Practice makes perfect, do you remember? Make training practical, with as many demonstrations as possible. Consider the option of demonstrating ‘in-person’ through screen sharing or remote control tools.
- Still, the goals and certain timeframes should be clearly defined and fixed. That’s where we approach the aspect of time management.
- Guidance in time management is an important aspect to consider. It will teach remote employees to set priorities, discover the most productive time for working, and not get distracted by everyday routine. Ensure the possibility to integrate a calendar and scheduling tools into your soft.
- Monitoring results and progress meetings are crucial for keeping your remote workers motivated as well as for building personal connections inside the team. Provide possibilities for mentoring, assessment, and feedback on the tasks fulfilled.
The modern market of training solutions offers multifaceted technologies and tools, which facilitate and enhance the remote learning experience. Let’s take a look at some of them.
The Best Software for Remote Training
Corporate training needs specific solutions, Linkedin Learning Solutions and Business Learning Solutions may become excellent examples of such products. Let’s see into the matter in more detail.
A learning management system is what you need for the purpose in the first turn. Such an integrated system allows to build a training course to match your educational needs and track learners’ attendance and progress.
At the same time, software solutions of such kind offer wide possibilities for content creation. You can choose any form you need - text, presentation, video, simulation, games, etc. Nowadays it’s essential to guarantee mobile compatibility and integrations with third-party services, for video-conferencing, for instance.
Tools for video conferences provide you with the opportunity to have training sessions in real time and bring your remote team together. Such solutions come in handy when face-to-face interaction is important. Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting - the choice is variable and up to you or e-learning services company you choose.
In case you use some project-management and collaboration tools in your working routine, you can use them for training as well, especially if the learning materials are texts or videos. Google, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, can be quite beneficial for the purpose.
Axisbits can create a service solution for your company
When choosing an off-the-shelf solution you are always restricted with its inbuilt options and modules. It’s at times difficult to adjust the out-of-the-box tool to your specific e-learning technology content and services. That’s why we advise custom e-learning software development.
With many years of software engineering behind and distant employees in our own staff, we realize the pains and challenges of coaching and managing a remote team first hand. That’s why the Axisbits team is ready to give a helping hand to any client who needs training software for remote employees.
We always carefully consider the requirements and tasks our clients set forth. However, there are some common features, which make for exceptional user experience in software products. We think any solution should be:
- User-friendly. Intuitive design and clear functionality make any tough process simple and pleasant. We’ll take care of it for your learners.
- Interactive. The opportunity to ask a question and to receive feedback supports motivation and engagement. We make our products interactive and advise it to you.
- Scalable. Your team may be small now but grow with the company development or projects fulfilled. It’s important to build a product that works well for current staff and does not fail for larger teams. Axisbits knows how to do it.
- Flexible. Any content needs updates and with training materials, it’s especially significant. So you should always have the opportunity to renew your content, tasks, and instructions.
To cut a long story short, our experts are ready to create an innovative e-learning solution for coaching a remote team with all your needs and requirements in mind supplemented with the existing best practices and our own experience. You can contact us at any time and get an expert consultation concerning your project.
Conclusion
Under the present shift to distant cooperation, the companies should focus their effort on how to engage a remote team and train the workforce to remain competitive in the modern world. To help your employees reveal their fullest potential, we advise you to equip yourself with an effective corporate software solution for continuous learning.
Now you know the challenges, principal features, and important aspects to keep in mind, and can define what exactly you need and want to implement.
Axisbits is eager to translate your educational needs into training practices through software development and enhance your business to a new level together. Let’s discuss it and create something amazing.
