Don’t let the prospect of remote training keep you from hiring the people your organization needs right now — check out these 6 tips to make the process more effective.
No one expected to be working from home for this long, but you can’t keep your business on standby while we wait to “get back to normal”.
For a few months, it was easy to delay a new hire or two and assume there will be an opportunity to bring them on when you’re back in the office. Fast forward to now, and we’re almost a year into the pandemic. Remote work has gone from a temporary fix to the new normal, and if you’ve been delaying a much-needed expansion of your staff, you can’t delay any longer.
How Should You Approach Remote Training?
While remote training is certainly not an ideal way to bring a new staff member onto the team, that doesn’t mean there aren’t steps you can take to make the process engaging and effective.
Try these 6 tips to adapt your training for the remote workplace:
- Don’t Waste Their Time: Some Zoom calls, just like some pre-pandemic meetings, are often more effective as emails. The more effort you make to value and respect a new employee’s time, the more they’ll do the same for you. They’ll feel more empowered in their new role, rather than drained by hours and hours of video calling it took to walk through a slideshow or document they could have reviewed at their own pace.
- Harness Available Technology: There are countless free tools and apps available to you — there’s no excuse for delivering your training as a long, text-heavy document, or a visual-aid free video call. Incorporate visual aids like videos and screenshots to help demonstrate processes. Encourage engagement with live whiteboarding during meetings. Use messenger apps to promote a casual communication counterpart to more rigid emails. Don’t forget — free doesn’t always mean secure. Always double-check what permissions you’re giving a new app when you download it.
- Focus On End-Results, Not Time Spent: The worst mistake a manager can make in the age of remote work is to become overly focused on how much time employees are logging at home. The fact is that more screen time does not necessarily mean higher productivity. You should make sure new employees understand their performance is judged by what they produce and achieve, not by how much time they spend looking at the computer each day.
- Track and Document Progress: Whatever form your remote training takes, make sure it’s carefully tracked for each employee. As you can’t have the conventional training period in the office with a new staff member, it’ll be all the more important to develop a documentation system that will track where they are in their training program.
- Make Sure They’re Working In The Right Space: Make sure that wherever your staff is going to work is comfortable, distraction-free, and as in-line with a normal workplace as possible. They may need to invest in an office chair, or even, depending on their work, a second monitor.
- Promote Balance In Their Workday: Make sure that your new staff member is striking the right balance at home. Just as they shouldn’t be slacking off because they’re not being supervised, they also shouldn’t overwork themselves. Make sure everyone is taking breaks to decompress, stretch, stay hydrated, and relax. Switching from a full office to their quiet house can be difficult for workers — don’t forget to schedule time for business and casual communication. Your employees should still communicate on a regular basis with one another and with you.
Don’t Underinvest In Your Remote Staff
The fact is that remote work doesn’t come naturally to everyone. This new era of remote working has led to the types of issues that managers would have addressed directly in the workplace. It’s not so easy now that you’re cut off from your team members.
A recent study has found that newly remote workers across the country are encountering a series of challenges in their daily work life:
- 19% experience loneliness
- 17% have difficulty communicating and collaborating
- 8% have trouble staying motivated
By developing a healthy remote work culture from day one with new employees, you’ll help them to be more engaged and more productive in their day-to-day work.
Orbis Solutions, Inc., in Las Vegas, Henderson, Summerlin and throughout Nevada, has developed creative, strategic and cost-effective technical solutions for a wide variety of clients. Offering a diverse range of products and services, Orbis provides IT solutions to promote your company’s productivity and profitability, and help you sort through the latest-hyped technology, so you can select the best hardware, software or service for your business needs.
