4 Ways to Create Online Training Program for Your Remote Working Team

By Gaurav Sharma

Research shows that every $1 spent on L&D per employee results in $4.70 additional revenue per employee.

Training your employees is an important activity to boost their morale. Office and remote working culture both have their pros and cons but employers should encourage their employees to boost productivity.

For this, they can follow the right activities such as starting corporate appreciation awards for employees, getting feedback, monthly employee awards, and training opportunities for remote and office employees. These activities can help you if your employees are also effectively contributing and participating in these opportunities more effectively.

For example, a field service provider agency can use the best field service management software to manage and communicate with field service workers effectively. It helps to increase their productivity with excellent service to your customers.

Let’s talk about training employees is a crucial activity and it can be a good option for the business to sharpen its internal employees skill set that ultimately helps your organization.

You can create SharePoint calendar and share it with your employees and ask them to join the online training session to upgrade your employees skills.

But to attain this high ROI, your employee training needs to be effective.

But how do you create an online training program that brings these impressive results when you have a remote team?

Let’s get into the details of the best ways to create an online training program.

Tactics to Create a Successful Online Training Program for Your Remote Team

Here are four ways to create an online training program to upskill, reskill, or onboard your remote team to drive better results.

Apply Microlearning Techniques

Microlearning involves creating bite-sized segments of your training content. Your remote team can study these segments where and when they want them.

Each segment covers a single topic in a short 3-5 minute lesson that’s easily digestible. The length of the lesson ensures that they don’t need to take time out of their schedule for it.

You can create a virtual employee handbook and share it with your all employees to follow the right practices to avoid any issues while working.

You should include workplace diversity training topics in your virtual employee handbook such as how to behave, communicate with their colleagues, and avoid any adverse situation in the remote workplace or office workplace.

Microlearning also works well with spaced repetition to boost retention.

According to research by Hermann Ebbinghaus, learners forget 60% of what they learn within 20 minutes. They continue forgetting as time passes, and by the 2^nd day, 75% of the information learned is forgotten.

The Forgetting Curve can be disrupted by reviewing the training material in intervals. When you create three to five-minute lessons, it’s easier for learners to revisit them.

Implement Video-Based Learning

Unlike long blocks of text, videos reduce cognitive overload, and that’s why you should consider video-based lessons.

They also capture the attention of your remote team and compel consumption.

For instance, between a 5-minute social selling how-to video and a 5,000-word text lesson on the same topic, most employees will choose the video.

The video will be shorter than reading a wall of text and would likely contain the same amount of information.

You can use a online video making tool from this Attrock list to create videos with scenario-based learning that deliver real learning experiences to your remote team. For instance, you can demonstrate a real-life work-related challenge and ways to handle them.

You can make the training more interactive through branching videos as well. These are interactive decision-making videos.

In these, your remote team members are required to respond to situations presented in the video by choosing an action and have a stable home WiFi connection that keeps you connected at all times. 

Branching videos develop your team’s critical thinking and decision-making skills.

Use Virtual Instructor-Led Training

If you want to create a real-time training program for your remote team, online instructor-led training will do.

You can conduct these classes using a good video conferencing tool such as Digital Samba.

In this case, learners don’t get the flexibility to attend the class when they want to. There’s an allotted time for the class. But they get the advantage of:

• Asking the instructor questions in real time.
• Learning from the questions other employees ask in the class.
• Engaging in discussions with other employees. It exposes them to diverse perspectives.
• Getting immediate feedback on their work from a subject matter expert.

Recording these sessions can help your team revisit the training to get clarity on areas they missed during the live class.

Be sure to incorporate videos, audio, GIFs, infographics, and text elements into your lessons to cater to all learning styles.

Also, you can arrange or ask your remote team to use standing desks, good internet speed, and lighting facilities in their working space while attending remote training to avoid any disturbance during this training season.

Train Using Gamification 

If you want your training programs to be even more interactive, create game-based learning events and add them to your training program.

Gamification involves the incorporation of gaming mechanics like points, levels, badges, and leaderboards into the training material.

For example, you can explain each step of employee monitoring software, and how it helps to increase their performance. You can create a quick video if they have any questions related to employee monitoring.

It adds elements of competition, 360-degree feedback, and rewards to the training.   

Here are a few illustrations of how you can add these gaming mechanics to your training:

• Assigning daily goals where the trainee earns points upon completion
• Using quizzes that rank trainees on a leaderboard. As you assign more quizzes, the trainees’ positions fall or rise on the leaderboard based on performance
• Giving badges at checkpoints and personalized awards upon completion
• Creating a theme, quest, or story that trainees follow throughout the training

Make their achievements even more rewarding by give them glass awards, enabling them to share the badges and awards on their social media profiles.

Here is an example of a good online learning platform that provides quality education to children:

Brighterly is an online platform designed to provide math tutoring services to children between the ages of 4 and 14. The platform matches students with experienced and trained math teachers, who guide them through 45-minute sessions using custom Brighterly tools, games, and activities.

Brighterly offers packages of varying course lengths, with longer packages providing additional features like homework help. The platform is suitable for children following the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The tutors on the platform are experienced in education and can adapt to meet the needs of children with special educational requirements. Brighterly is accessible through a web app, which allows for usage on any device with a browser, webcam, and microphone.

Key Things to Implement While Designing Your Online Training Program

Here are three main things that you should take care of when you’re designing your online training program.

Set Your Training Goals

Evaluate the skills gap of your remote team first. 

A skills gap is a mismatch between the skills your remote team possesses and the skills that are necessary for them to succeed in their roles.

You can prepare an employee feedback survey to get their thoughts on their own skills and their desire to learn new skills.

It’ll help you set learning and development goals that bring your organization closer to achieving its objectives.

How do you perform a skills gap analysis?

Start by identifying the skills your team needs:

• Identify the skills employees need to meet your company’s mission and goals.
• Research the “future of work” trends related to your industry and the related skills. It’ll reduce your future staff augmentation costs.

Next, assess the current skill level of your remote team members.

• Have your remote-team members self-evaluate their skills using questionnaires and surveys.
• Carry out virtual interviews with your remote team members to assess their skill level.

Finally, find the gap between the skills your company needs now and in the future and the skills your remote team possesses. Use this data to set your training goals.

Encourage Social Networking

Create opportunities for employees to have meaningful interactions with each other and their instructors. It can boost their motivation and engagement.

Find the most popular social media platform among your employees, such as Facebook or Twitter, and create a page where they can connect.

If you carry out social recruiting, inviting your trainees to the page should be easy. You can also add a hyperlink to the social media page on your LMS.

Turn the page into an open forum where team members can share ideas, tips, or hints that can benefit their peers.

If you’re a full-service marketing agency, for instance, you can start conversations by posing intriguing questions that trainees can respond to.

Ask questions like “what are the challenges companies are facing in 2022” “what are our competitors doing better” and “how can we get more sales leads from social media?”

Continually Improve Your Training

Use your LMS to track the effectiveness of your online training program. It’ll help you know if your employees are absorbing the learning material.

This can help you make informed decisions on courses you need to improve or replace and whether to change the training delivery method. 

Track things like:

• Course completions
• The time your remote team takes to complete the training program
• Their performance in specific assessments and post-training quizzes
• Engagement rates

But don’t just rely on your online courses and LMS, ask your remote employees for feedback.

A survey at the end of the training will capture their experience and shed light on the weaknesses of your training.

You can ask their opinion on the delivery of the online training program and its helpfulness. Ask them to point out areas they’d like to see improved in the next training.

Once you have this data, use it to make your online training program better.

Need an example?

The remote team needs to organize the online meetings in an optimized mode to get maximum results. You need to prepare special season on how to schedule meetings effectively and how to prepare for online meetings. It’s a very crucial part of the remote working culture for now.

Create Your Online Remote Training Program

Your training program doesn’t have to be any less effective because it’s done online and targets a remote team.

Create a blended learning delivery method that combines microlearning, videos, VILT, and gamification for an effective training program that meets your training goals.

And don’t forget to create an open forum on social media where trainees can interact.

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