No matter where your employees are located, they need to be given proper training in their line of work. You want them to improve whether they’re located down the hall or in another country. Remote training has become an essential part of many companies and learning how to do it properly can mean the difference between a good workforce and an ineffective one. Here are some tips that might help you better teach your remote employees. 

Interact face-to-face

Every good training program requires an interactive experience. Being face-to-face with your trainer and getting valuable instantaneous input can be a huge benefit for the learning experience. Unfortunately, remote employees do not have the luxury of being next to their trainer in person. On the other hand, you don’t have to be there in person to provide face-to-face interaction.

Technology has improved to the point that you can instantly communicate over video calls with an employee halfway across the world. Video chat programs like Skype make it much easier to give your trainees direct information and instructions that will further their knowledge of the job.

Encourage peer-to-peer networking

In today’s interconnected world, it would be a shame if your remote employees didn’t communicate with one another. Remind them that they are all working towards a common goal and that there’s nothing wrong with consulting one another when topics become difficult. Treat your training sessions as a virtual classroom, where students are free to help each other out.

Social media is a wonderful communication tool for remote employees. They can freely share videos among themselves in custom personal chat rooms. If they find something that could help others learn the topic even better, there’s no reason to discourage it.

Make it continuous

Since you aren’t constantly interacting with your remote employees, training is often broken up into several different sessions. Despite this, it’s essential that you keep your training sessions consistent so that the employee can improve at a regular rate.

Create clear goals for the first three months and try to adhere to them. These goals can be used to determine the course of the employee’s training. After the initial phase, training sessions should still be incorporated in a regular routine, but you can make them less frequent if you feel that the employee has learned a lot.

Both sides should give feedback

Training isn’t a one-way lane of communication. It’s a dynamic interaction between two individuals that both have something to learn from the experience. The trainer has to be open to feedback from the trainee. Teaching someone across long distances can be difficult even for an experienced educator.

After some training sessions, encourage feedback from your trainees. Ask them what part of the training program appeals to them most and how they believe it could be improved. At the same time, try to assess their level of progress. If they are lagging behind some of their coworkers, they need to be kept up to speed. Without feedback, you can’t make changes that will help both trainers and trainees improve.

Be flexible with your schedule

Long distances aren’t just impractical because they prevent you from having a hands-on approach. Employees might be located several time zones away from you, which can influence the timing of training sessions. If you schedule a video call at ten in the morning, that could be too early for someone that has to get up at three AM in order to join it. Another part of your team might have already finished up their work at four PM, etc.

Working with remote team members requires a certain degree of flexibility. You have to be able to accommodate several employees despite their time zones if you want to see results.

Make use of videos

Sometimes, you won't be able to create an effective training environment for multiple trainees at once. It's a common issue in remote training. Luckily, you don't have to teach them everything in a live video session. Some topics are easy to cover in pre-recorded videos. You can send these videos to trainees and they can watch them whenever they have time to learn.

With the assistance of your video production company, you can create videos of professional quality and clarity, which trainees will use as educational tools in your line of work. Make sure that the videos cover a specific topic that can be revisited when needed.

Apply bite-sized learning techniques

Remote workers might not be able to spare a large amount of time every day in order to learn from training sessions. If possible, you should try a technique that is called “content chunking”. Think of them as sessions that cover one or two topics in a relatively small amount of time. Instead of taking a comprehensive look at every possible element of one aspect of work, you should create a session that will quickly teach someone basic principles.

Bite-sized learning techniques are great for getting someone up to speed when there are many different topics to be learned. They are easy to remember, which is important when you’re short on time and can’t repeat past lessons.

Conclusion

Training remote employees can be a difficult task. They are physically separated from the rest of the company, so training requires a bit more effort on the part of trainers. As long as you stick to some of these tips, you will find that your training sessions will go much smoother and your distant employees will become more proficient in their work.