3 Ways to Strengthen Corporate Training in a Remote-Centered World

If you’re shifting to a remote team, your company’s training program might fall to the wayside. If you’ve always trained people in person, but are now operating solely online, it’s easy to send training materials to new hires through email and call it a day.

Emailing new hires a training manual isn’t sufficient and it won’t benefit your company.

Improve Corporate Training in Remote Workplaces

Right now, it’s more important than ever that you have strong team members properly trained to get targeted results. Although it might seem impossible to thoroughly train a remote team, it just takes a few adjustments to your usual training routine.

1. Use a professional video recording system

Giant corporations like IBM and Microsoft maximize their training sessions by having employees watch pre-recorded meetings, presentations, and training sessions. Recorded videos drastically reduce the amount of time required to train an employee. However, it’s important that pre-recorded training materials be produced with high-quality audio and video and be easy to access remotely.

Intelligent Video Solutions makes this possible with a corporate training video system that not only captures video, but catalogs each recorded presentation in a way that specifically supports future training. For example, all recordings are securely stored in the cloud and are accessible from anywhere using a browser. Each video can be annotated with comments, which become text-searchable, and access to each video in the training library is controlled by user groups.

Video training libraries have always been beneficial to corporate teams training in person. Today, they’re even more beneficial since they make it easy to securely train remote team members all across the world.

2. Prioritize feedback from new hires during training

Fresh eyes from new hires are your best chance at identifying and strengthening weak areas in your corporate training program. When you’re used to company procedures, systems, and software, it’s sometimes hard to tell if something isn’t working right. Familiarity with a system tends to mask all the workarounds you created for that system early on.

The best thing you can do for your organization is prioritize gathering feedback from new hires. While not all of their frustrations will be the result of a flaw in the system, they’ll be able to catch things only a fresh pair of eyes can see.

Receiving and acting on feedback can boost employee satisfaction

According to remote work statistics published by Flexjobs, 57% of remote employees are satisfied with their jobs compared to 51% of traditional office employees. Employee satisfaction directly impacts the effort they put into onboarding, guiding, and helping new hires. Employees who love their job tend to go out of their way to help new team members acclimate to the company’s way of doing things.

You can increase an employee’s level of satisfaction by actively soliciting feedback and making appropriate changes based on that feedback. This applies to everyone, not just new hires.

For example, if an employee provides feedback about a company process that is difficult or ineffective, look into the process to pinpoint the issue and become committed to making it better. Ask the employee for their ideas and then implement changes to improve the process.

3. Prioritize company culture as part of your training

Never underestimate the power of fostering a strong, cohesive company culture during the training process. Remember, your new hires will take on the attitudes and habits of those who train them.

Demonstrating the right attitude and habits is easy when you’re training in person because it can be immediately observed. However, when training new hires remotely, your trainers need to go out of their way to model company culture in every interaction at all times, even in text messages and emails. This will ensure that your new hires adopt the proper company culture from the start.

Keep training a top priority to get targeted results

Your company’s success hinges on how well your employees are trained to perform their duties to your standards. Unfortunately, the importance of training is often underestimated in the corporate world. Often, companies hire experienced professionals and expect them to perform without any formal training.

Training isn’t just for newbies to an industry. A training program brings an employee’s skills into alignment with the company’s brand, expectations, and priorities. An employee can be a top expert in their field and will still fail in their position without proper training.

Thorough and effective training is central to developing a strong team that represents your brand and most importantly, gets targeted results.

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This article, "3 Ways to Strengthen Corporate Training in a Remote-Centered World" was first published on Small Business Trends