There is a growing trend toward remote work. In Owl Labs’ 2021 State of Remote Work Report, they found that 16% of businesses worldwide are fully remote. The report also suggests that nearly two-thirds of employees between ages 22 and 65 say they sometimes or often work from home. These figures confirm that remote work is here to stay.

Manufacturing and product-based businesses might have a harder time adopting remote work, owed to a need for more real-time, hands-on collaboration. A service business, however, can adopt remote work successfully with relative ease, given the right virtual team training.

For instance, a remote sales team will need virtual training to start selling online. Such virtual training can include simulating a sales call, setting up a virtual training session for customer support, or practicing effective use of software in virtual collaboration.

Here are three best practices for virtual training you must keep in mind when training remote teams.

1. Use the Right Technology

Remote work relies on seamless communication between the in-house teams, clients, vendors and remote workers. Therefore, training for effective collaboration amongst team members will drive better results.

Slack, along with video conferencing apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams offers low-cost and simple-to-use team communication options. You may use them to share training resources, have online discussions or broadcast live training sessions.

Using technology for intuitive training involves engaging the remote workforce using screenshots or videos to demonstrate how-to steps. This makes remote training clearer and easier to grasp.

Leverage a learning management system (LMS) to store training resources for remote teams, implement training schedules and be a part of business knowledge management. An LMS reduces team efforts by keeping track of outcomes and engagement. It is also useful for conducting, sharing and saving test results. You can analyze results by sharing the percentage, date completed, and certificate status.

2. Measure Training Effectiveness

While you are taking your best shot at providing quality training and engaging employees using a slew of modern tools, it is essential to gauge the effectiveness of training.

An effective training program should improve performance through enhanced skills development. This means your managers still need to guide their teams in the right direction and regularly monitor their inputs.

Tracking effectiveness will help you understand which courses and training are most successful and which need refinements or replacements.

Some of the major factors that determine the success of remote team training include:

• One-on-one discussions: Engage weekly with your team members to know their training experiences and modify the course accordingly.
• Surveys and questionnaires: Send follow-up forms to let employees share their feedback on their training experience. This is useful to tailor training content to match the team’s expectations.
• Assessments: Utilize post-training assessments to understand whether employees have acquired the necessary competencies from training.

Alternatively, you can measure training’s impact by adopting Kirkpatrick’s training evaluation model. It helps gauge remote training effectiveness throughout various training phases.

You can also create a framework for training based on key performance indicators (KPIs). Align training with business goals and blend in the corresponding KPIs to help to create effective training that improves your business’ bottom line.

And, as you pick up the right tools and gauge training effectiveness based on KPIs, think of tracking employee performance. This helps to understand how employees respond to training and whether you can its impact.

3. Track Employee Performance

As an employer, you can efficiently track virtual employees’ performance by engaging in ongoing communication and evaluating their outputs.

Many tools and tactics come in handy. For instance, an interactive quiz can help determine employee understanding and track their learning rate. Leverage their learning data to offer useful suggestions to learning and development (L&D) teams who can then make improvements to the training process.

Also, leverage task management tools to monitor how fast they move tasks from initiation to completion and whether they face bottlenecks in completing tasks.

By selecting the right technology to support your remote learning programs, measuring learning effectiveness through assessments and tracking KPIs and monitoring employees’ performance post-training, you will be equipped to deliver an effective virtual training program.

Conclusion

Effective virtual training can help you support and upskill your remote workforce. Guarantee your team’s continued growth regardless of where they’re working from by planning and conducting effective remote training sessions.

Ideally, training should rely on the cohesive business objective — increase and measure the productivity of a remote team, acquire new project skills and drive team collaboration. As a by-product, training ensures staff retention and improved team spirit by fostering growth and investment in the organization.

The tips mentioned above may not suffice for a comprehensive remote training plan, but they are enough to get you started in the right direction.