1 in 7 working adults worked from home exclusively between the 27th of April and 8th May 2022 meaning many of us are still remote working.
Since the pandemic, remote working and hybrid working have become common terms used in job adverts. The need for flexibility that arose during the pandemic has continued on.
Now, with these options being available, companies need to be able to understand what natural changes this causes in the work environment and what they can provide is suited to these adjustments.
For Learning & Development, remote and hybrid working has led to a lot of change. With this there are some key alterations you can make to help ease your employees’ learning experiences…
Create scenario-based learning
Successful training is often based on real-life experiences. Just providing facts and information alone will give a minimal result.
However, with remote working, it’s easy to slip into this way of training. Not being around others can make it hard to create interactivity, but scenario-based learning could be a good solution to this.
Think about your in-person work environment or what common situations your employees will often be faced with. What is it like? How can you mimic that for your remote workers?
Integrate eLearning
Want to ensure your learning is available to all? Moving over to eLearning would provide exactly that.
Although, not all training will be fully suitable solely as eLearning, for remote workers it’s key that as much training as possible is available to them to ensure equal opportunities for all.
So, where you can consider making it solely eLearning? Not only does this support your remote workers, but it makes learning easier to revisit also.
Provide online resources
Imagine sending out paper resources to all your remote workers. It would take a lot of time and money to produce and send them out.
For many companies, this is not possible, however, resources still need to be provided to those who work remotely. Therefore, it’s time to make them digital.
This isn’t just providing them with the documents, it requires you to make them online-friendly, so they aren’t needed to be printed out. Not everyone will have a printer meaning you need to cater to all workers’ needs.
So, create interactive resources, add visuals and get them engaged!
Hold online video lessons
Where you have remote workers, and you are unable or do not wish to move over to eLearning then you need to be altering your in-person training to suit this way of working.
You can do this by turning those in-person sessions into video sessions. Where you can’t be in the classroom, you have to bring that classroom to them.
Video lessons still allow for discussions to take place meaning they can still be interactive similarly to what it would be like in-person.
Create an online knowledge hub
With remote working, comes the likelihood of more online resources, information, content and documents that need to be hosted somewhere.
The best option for this in order for remote workers to access all of the different information easily is to create an online knowledge hub.
It puts everything your remote employees need in one place. Everyone can then access it and it provides extra benefits such as encouragement of progression and most likely increased skills.
Hold group activities on a call
Remote working can lead to distance between your workforces. Not seeing each other on a regular basis can cause a lack of motivation, a sense of feeling devalued and a loss of communication.
Therefore, to avoid this from happening and to encourage continued learning you need to keep that motivation up. Although, your team may not be in-person with one another you can still hold group activities over a video call.
Whether these activities are work-related or for fun, you’ll just have to suit those activities to be able to be done on a call.
No matter how much of your workforce is remote or hybrid working, it’s always important that all your employees are provided with the same support and work opportunities.
The only way this can be done is through change, to look at how we can help you with this change, check out our Services. Read more articles on Learning & Development in our blog centre!
