How to Provide Remote Employees With Blended Training

68% of employees think that training and development is a company’s most important policy.

While it is true that the pandemic situation changed a lot of things for businesses, the importance of employee training has only been boosted.

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Tips to Provide Effective Training for Remote Workers

At a time when companies are laying off employees left and right, those that still have their jobs are surrounded by uncertainty.

In such a situation, employee training can be a great way to assure your employees that their future is secure and that they don’t have to look for a new job.

Even for businesses that have had to halt their operations altogether, employee training is a great way to turn this downtime into productive time.

As important as employee training is during this time, delivering training to remote employees poses some unique challenges.

One such challenge is continuing to provide remotely working employees with blended training. Combining elements of self-paced and instructor led training, blended training is a proven way to deliver an engaging and impactful training experience.

So how do you continue providing your employees with a blend of self paced training and instructor led training when social distancing norms prohibit proximity and lockdowns have confined trainers and learners to their homes?

The simple answer is, with video conferencing solutions.

With the right video conferencing solutions, you can have your trainers deliver instructor led training on your employee’s computers and mobile devices.

With that said, simply having a video conferencing tool is not enough to deliver a quality blended training experience to your learners.

Train Your Trainers

A trainer’s ability to engage learners is truly tested when training is delivered in a virtual environment. With no eye contact or access to facial cues of the students, if the trainers are not actively trying to engage them, the learning experience can feel disconnected and uninteresting.

For this reason, it is important to make sure your trainers are well prepared to deliver training sessions in an online scenario.

To engage learners in a virtual training environment, it is important for trainers to be intentional about ensuring that the learners are participating in the training. Here are a couple of ways they can do that.

Use the first five minutes of the lecture for expectation setting. During this time, the trainer can explain to the learners the importance of the concepts they will be taught and their relevance to the employees’ professional roles. This time should also be used to briefly tell the learners about the flow of the training session, along with the expected learning outcomes.
Hold a quick ice-breaking activity in the beginning. By simply asking each trainee to introduce themselves, a trainer can ensure they feel a little more confident when it is time to ask questions.
Train the trainers to ask engaging questions from the learners. For instance, after explaining a concept, a trainer can ask a question like, “<Name>, what do you think about this?”.

Make It Easier For Learners

Your learners (employees) are probably going through a lot to drive their productivity. Those that are all alone are fighting with the feeling of loneliness and those that live with kids are fighting to concentrate.

By helping them make the training experience easier, you can ensure they perform better. You can do this in a number of ways.

For starters, make sure all your learners are well versed with the software and platforms you will use to deliver training.

Then, utilise the features of these platforms to make it easier for the learners to interact with their trainers. For instance, teach everyone to use the chat box feature to post their questions.

This way, the questions will not interrupt the training and will be recorded in a single place and the trainers can address them one by one at the end of the lecture.

Conclusion

While delivering instructor led training is the major challenge in delivering online blended training, it is also important for organisations to rethink their self paced training content and ensure that it is easily accessible and optimised for engagement.