The world has undergone a rapid transformation and the workplace hasn’t been left untouched. The sudden switch to remote working has many companies clamouring to adjust to conditions of the new digital workplace while discovering ways to effectively train remote employees.
The need of the hour is to equip your teams with effective collaboration tools and subscribe to a secure digital workplace that offers extensive connection, communication and sharing features.
However, merely equipping your remote teams is not enough. This is the time to build a strong team, leverage diverse talent and create protocols for remote working.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, almost a quarter of Americans already work from home; in the current situation, many find themselves facing an abrupt shift into the mode of working from home.
Working at home comes with its own set of challenges, employees find it harder to concentrate on their work, face a loss of productivity and find it a challenge to coordinate with their colleagues and accomplish tasks effectively. This is exactly why it is so important to train remote employees to work from home and as a part of your team.
Here are some of the common issues faced by remote employees as they work from home:
- Lack of effective support and supervision with the absence of face-to-face interaction.
- Delay in sharing information or work instructions, which results in postponed tasks.
- Technical challenges or poor connectivity.
- Decreased productivity due to social isolation and increased anxiety.
- Increased distraction at home due to non-professional environment, parents, partners, children and pets.
Join us as we explore how to train remote employees and enable them to work from home effectively:
Establish a Training System to Train Remote Employees
Training remote teams require the right tools to be used in the right manner to impart the right message. This is the time to get creative and use advanced tools to arrange conference calls and webinars to train your remote teams how to work effectively.
If you are looking at training a large remote workforce across different departments then you should go for synchronous learning, i.e., sessions where all the workers are participating in training sessions simultaneously. This not only helps you to train more employees at once but also ensures uniformity across the board.
These sessions can also be used as a team-building exercise as it can be utilized to build a sense of camaraderie with remote colleagues.
An efficient system also requires a set schedule; make a list of how many training lessons are required and map out the frequency and the order in which they are to be given and inform your employees about the same. Let the department heads train their respective employees but address them yourself so that they do feel like they are a part of the team and company.
Self-Learning and Interactive Training
Training your employees comprises a fine line between spoon-feeding them every instruction and leaving them to fend for themselves.
The best training plan combines a mix of self-learning and interactive learning; you guide your employees on how to perform a certain task and then test them using sample assignments.
This enables them to employ the training received and figure out a few things on their own. Make sure that your remote employees know that they can always reach out to you or senior management whenever they face a hurdle and are unsure about how to proceed. Handling their queries with patience will leave you with well-trained, efficient and loyal employees who work quite efficiently even as they work remotely.
Connection and Communication
As we switch to remote modes of working, it is important to have effective channels of communication backed by strong digital connections.
Whether we talk about training remote employees or managing remote teams, staying connected and in touch are of vital importance. Your remote employees should be able to connect to an online platform to work effectively and stay connected with each other to work as a whole.
Effective communication channels include internal email, live chat and video calls that enable team members to work collectively and the management to relay new work instructions swiftly for faster implementation.
Effective Collaboration Tools
Successful collaboration requires efficient collaboration tools including a fully-integrated collaboration platform that enables easy data sharing and secure storage.
Once you have equipped your team member with the requisite tools, you then need to train them how to use these features while establishing a protocol for secure transfer of sensitive data and information.
This means using advanced technological tools that break geographical and time zone barriers to allow remote workers to work in sync with each other.
An effective digital workplace must have the following features to train remote employees and enable advanced collaboration:
- Desktop virtualization capability
- Single sign-in protocol
- Established shift schedules
- Easy file transfer and sharing resources
- Document resource libraries and secure storage
- Ticketing systems to track client requests and status updates
- Live Chat feature for constant communication
- Advanced automated workflow automation
Create Groups for Social Interaction
As the saying goes, “All work and no fun makes Jack a dull boy.” Well, all work and no interaction make your employees less supportive and effective.
While it’s good that your remote employees focus on work, it is equally important that they interact with each other as colleagues and develop bonds of friendship. Social interaction between employees from the same and different departments promotes a spirit of collaboration and mutual support that help build a strong remote team.
Studies further suggest that employees are more likely to work in unison and step in for others when they know them personally.
Empower Employees to Do Better
To efficiently train remote employees, you also need to provide them with structured supervision and the motivation to perform better.
This means creating a system of structured supervision by setting up daily check-ins with teams and regular progress reports so that your team members stay sharp and focused while working from home. The daily check-ins are also an excellent way to assign the primary tasks for the day and give new updates to your remote employees.
The periodic report meetings are also an excellent way to keep tabs on the progress made by your remote teams and identify areas where more training is required.
The Solution
An effective way to train and manage remote teams is by subscribing to the ARDEM Collaboration Platform. Our cloud-based platform allows you to stay connected and manage your remote teams effectively. Our platform is supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is secured using single sign-on and a series of VPS, SSLs and encryption protocols.
The platform comes with live chat features and secure folders for uploading raw, unprocessed data and downloading high-quality output. Given below are a few key features and advantages of the ARDEM Collaboration Platform and we help you train remote employees.
The ARDEM Collaboration Platform
How It Works:
- Once the contracts have been signed and you are officially on board, ARDEM will send you login credentials.
- Using them, you can log in and access your personal dashboard on the ARDEM Collaboration Manager (ACM). You don’t need to download any special software or app for this. You can easily access the platform on your regular browser by simply typing in the correct address.
- You can then chat with your ARDEM Project Owner regarding your scope of work, processing instructions, delivery requirements, and performance expectations.
- You can further drag and drop your vendor bills to the ACM or simply have your vendors send their bills directly to the ACM.
- ARDEM uses a combination of Data Entry, Data Capture, Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning and AI technologies to process your work.
- The dashboards available on ACM give you a window into your processing in real-time and can be customized to view the analytics of your choice.
- Reports, as defined in the scope of work, are created and shared by your ARDEM team.
- Output data files, as required, are available for download.
- APIs are further built in to optimize and streamline your accounts payable processing, all this is achieved remotely through advanced cloud-based technologies.
- We further manage all the training aspects of your remote workforce so you can focus on your primary processes and core competencies.
The ARDEM Advantage:
- We further manage all the training aspects of your remote workforce so you can focus on your primary processes and core competencies.
- You can also build and publish quality professional courses via an advanced discourse builder and easy-to-manage user interface.
- Our platform further enables you and your team to personalize training without incurring any administrative overheads.
Get in touch with us today to discover successful remote working solutions!