As your company expands and launches new offices across the country and internationally, the once intimate environment that was once so effective for training becomes less feasible with employees working remotely from the central office. For one, it’s hard to keep everyone up to speed when they’re geographically dispersed. You could fly the remote workers to New York for training, but that is expensive and you’ll have to get permission to do so. There has to be a more efficient solution. Also, when companies expand, two corporate cultures can develop and this can be a disaster.

Sometimes satellite offices can have as few as 2-3 employees and they never get visited by the leadership team. A person joining such a team can very easily feel undervalued and marginalized. Here’s where online training, and more specifically blended learning, can come in handy in making sure that your remote team has access to the same great training as your headquarters (HQ) team.

Is Online Learning Really Good Enough for Remote Staff?

Not surprisingly, the transition to online learning for your remote team will raise many questions for you.

For example, isn’t clocking in face-time important for engagement? Won’t online learning sacrifice the high touch experience that you get from face-to-face learning? Will you be able to deliver on the same learning perspective to your remote trainees online? Also, what happens to the PowerPoints and other materials that you use? How do you begin to make your course materials online ready? These are good questions but there are other equally important challenges that you may not have considered!

• Tracking Employee Performance. For one, how can you measure the performance of remote workers? After all, it’s important to keep track of whether employees are performing up to the standards. Not to mention that you have to analyze the effectiveness of your program in developing relevant skills and productivity.
• Foster Social Engagement Between Remote and HQ employees. Establishing personal interaction among all employees is necessary to encourage collaboration, but it’s challenging to create if everyone is not in the same geographical location. Are there communication or social media tools that can allow remote workers to feel up to speed and not alienated from the employees in the central office?
• How to Use the Dynamics of “Gamification”. Gamification has proven to encourage participation and productivity in a workplace – the concept of using game mechanics when training is a great way to engage new remote hires! How can you apply gamification to increase learning, team building, innovation, and the satisfaction of remote workers?
• How to Use the Right Technologies. As your training program transitions from face-to-face learning to online-based learning, technology will play a bigger role as a resource. You’ll need to think about what technology would be appropriate to achieve effective sharing of information, communication, and can deliver an engaging experience.
• Language Localization. If you are going international, international offices can create language barriers. How can these barriers be broken? And how will you ensure that foreign speakers are equally engaged to the informational materials given to them as your native English speakers are?

Steps to Establish a Stellar Learning Experience for Remote Workers

Step 1: Define Your Success Criteria

First, make sure that you and management understand what is needed to make the training program successful for your company. Know your organization’s goals and define what behaviors the team needs to get there. These are the behaviors that you then reinforce in your training program. However, with multiple goals to tackle and limited resources, you can’t hit everything. Use these two questions as a framework to identify where to begin when you have limited resources.

Question 1: Should You Repurpose Content or Create New Programs From Scratch?

You will have to think about whether you want to create a new training program from scratch or use existing materials. Repurposing content would mean, for example, that you convert the content from your PowerPoints into eLearning modules.

This may be far less costly and time-consuming than creating completely new content. However, creating new content may also be necessary to fill information gaps that remote workers may not have access to.

Question 2: What is More Important Right Now, Scale or Effectiveness?

You also need to consider your priorities – do you want a few highly trained employees or rapid rollout of training sacrificing high touch training elements? Often, in the earlier stages of business, the first few hires have a lot of impact on the company so high touch training is valuable. However, as the company undergoes rapid expansion, high touch training becomes a less efficient process. In an illustrative example, one of our clients, a fast growing, mobile ad network, realized this challenge when they got to 100+ employees and they continued to stick with a very high touch onboarding process for their new hires. They soon realized that they weren’t having onboarding sessions for several weeks when the founders were gone on overseas business trips. Using Mindtickle, they were able to flip the training process and codify the key messages and orientation information for the new hires. This freed up energy for leaders to deliver the strategic content in intimate coffee chats, allowing for a meaningful exchange of ideas. Now the Co-founders spend more quality time with their new hires after they have gone through the online onboarding experience.

Step 2: Recognize the Learning Culture

Next, be aware of the learning culture at your company. Is it a “learning culture,” where improving performance, knowledge, and skills are encouraged? If this is not the case, a “change management” investment may be required so that the right incentives are put in place to motivate employees. This is important to consider because your training program will be easier to launch and more successful in a culture that already invests in ongoing learning. Setting relevant principles, values, and preferred behaviors from management down help to paint a clear picture of what all employees should be striving for.

Step 3: What Approach to Take: Staged Rollout or Big Bang

In terms of implementing change in a business, big bang refers to instant adoption and staging rollout refers to more gradual adoption over an extended period of time. Consider both options and determine which is the more appropriate approach for your situation. The big bang adoption could be faster and cheaper but more overwhelming and prone to failure due to inability to adapt and substantial productivity loss while everyone is adjusting to change. On the other hand, staging rollout may be more time and cost consuming but there is more time to adapt and productivity loss is less critical.

Step 4: Know What Resources You Have at Your Disposal

While transforming the training program to meet the learning needs of all employees, consider the resources that you already have and how you can adapt it to a more online-based system. What technologies does your company already possess and how can you take advantage of employees’ subject matter expertise in order to create an efficient and effective training program.

Step 5: Create a System to Achieve Your Goals

You should not only focus on what to achieve but also how to achieve it! You can set goals but you also need to create an effective management and training system. For example, what are the specific training processes that should be introduced and the right timing? How does the training program need to tie in with performance management? How should the training promote work-related habits to reinforce positive outcomes?

Remote employees don’t have to feel like orphans or second-rate citizens. Blended learning combines internet-based learning with face-to-face learning in order to create a personalized and engaging learning experience. It has the potential to decrease training costs, increase employee engagement with training, and adapt to the individual needs of each employee.

With a blended learning model and some effort, your remote employees can have access to a high-quality learning experience – the same as their colleagues over in HQ! Now it is your turn. Let us know your thoughts. How do you keep your remote employees up to speed with training?

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Your team is awesome. Each member is doing what they need to do to get the job done. However, over time you’ve come to realize that the even amongst your awesome team members, the differences in the way they approach their tasks to lead to varied results. E.g. the way Patrick completes a project is very different from the way that Veronica completes it. Also, Patrick and Veronica occasionally miss the mark on achieving the results you believe they should be achieving. On the other hand, when top performer Karen does a project, you are ecstatic. Karen gets amazing results to the point where the clients write rave reviews about her. You are now convinced – everyone needs to approach their projects more like Karen.

Your top employees have the knowledge, understanding of company culture, and the personal touch that can help make your business more successful. The key is to unlock the potential of the best and brightest ideas from your team. With just a little effort, you can enlist the help of skilled employees to uplift the rest of the team to a new level of excellence.

Imagine how standardizing your processes according to the best practices pioneered by top performers like Karen could help your employees work more efficiently and improve the performance. When your organization is quickly growing, and your team is doing ad-hoc solutions, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure that the best ideas are diffused across your organization. This becomes ten times more challenging when you have multiple offices.

Benefits of getting your top performers involved in the training process

Getting your team involved in the training process will reap the following benefits:

1. Effective application of the material. You can ensure that the employee not only gets the information but that they are also effectively applying it to their specific role when you have your top employees helping to train them. Getting the day to day application knowledge first hand from the people who use it daily is, quite simply, the best way to get them to hit the ground running.
2. A more engaging experience. You are offering your team a more engaging learning and bonding experience when they can have a hands-on experience with a team member that currently knows the ins and outs of the company. It builds a more cohesive team for the employees to be learning from each other.
3. Easier evaluation of employees. It is easier to evaluate the progress of employees when your established team members help with the training process because your experts know how the role should be performed and can clearly see any performance gaps in their trainees.
4. Adds additional structure to the learning experience. It is also vital to involve your top employees who are already performing the job in the training process. One of the most effective ways to learn is to engage in intelligent conversation with an expert on a subject. Mentoring and shadowing are an excellent supplement to research and independent learning.
5. Connects knowledge seekers to knowledge creators.You can tap into your top employees’ experiences by seeking their feedback in creating a training program that is specific to their function. They should also share their best practices and tips with the team.

A word of warning – expert employees don’t automatically make expert trainers

You might initially conclude that your most experienced employees would automatically make your best trainers. However, that is not automatically the case. Over time, we can develop what is referred to as an unconscious competence. We become so experienced that we can expertly accomplish the task without even thinking. E.g. we all seem to be able to type our passwords correctly without even having to think, but when we have to think of the password, it takes us a minute to remember it. Once you reach that level of unconscious competence, it can be difficult to train others. That process could be frustrating to both the trainer and the trainee. There are, however, ways to help turn expert employees who might not naturally be expert trainers into some of your company’s best training resources.

How to help your expert employees be excellent trainers

In order to properly utilize your employees as excellent trainers, you want to ensure that your employees have the following skills:

• They know how to perform the necessary tasks.
• They know how to explain the tasks.

Both of those points are necessary in order to have your current employees truly be beneficial to your training program.

If your expert employee knows how to perform the tasks, but is not fully prepared to explain the tasks you can:

1. Have your employee participate in mock training sessions with their team members. These mock training sessions can help your employee gain valuable training experience and help to make them more comfortable with the training process. Also, it helps them understand their unconscious competence, and become aware of their own best practices that they have become habituated to.

Action Item: Your expert employees can practice training others within their department different aspects of their role until they feel comfortable training on the same material.  Your employees can also provide valuable feedback to one another based on these mock training sessions.

2. Seek the feedback of your employees to determine the strength and weakness of each potential trainer.  If you have employees that perform similar roles, you can have each employee train only the portions of the material that they both know how to perform and know how to explain.

Action Item: If you have two-star employees that both perform sales, you can have each employee explain what they are comfortable teaching and have them train others together. This helps each of your star employees focus on their strengths with the safety of having their colleague there to help train on the things that they may not feel as confident about.

3. Leverage psychology to help your current employees become expert trainers.  The issue may not be that your employee lacks the skill to be an excellent trainer, but that they lack the confidence or motivation to do so.  Leverage psychology to spark the internal drive of your employees.

Action Item: Consider integrating game mechanics and social engagement such as points, medals, badges and leaderboards, social tools profiles, comments, chats, and walls. Your trainees can collaborate making learning more efficient, effective and delightful.

Your best employees have the potential to be your best trainers. By utilizing your top employees, you can grant your organization access to the most efficient and successful ways of serving customers. How do you currently use your employees for training programs? Do you have any tips that you want to share? Leave your comments below!