Training And Development For Remote Workforce: Adapting To The Post-Covid-19 World

In the post-COVID world, organizations have gotten used to undertaking business processes that cater to remote working. Over the last two years, organizations across the globe have realized the importance of working remotely and making the most of digital platforms. When it comes to training and development, options like microlearning, learning management systems, and other eLearning methods allow organizations to provide seamless training to their employees. 

A significant trend emerging out of the COVID crisis is that of microlearning. During and after the pandemic, microlearning has helped companies worldwide provide seamless and effective training to their employees. The new model allows you to make the most of digital platforms and manage training content according to the needs and preferences of your employees. 

What Do You Mean By Microlearning?

Microlearning is a mode of digital learning that involves sharing training in small and easily consumable chunks. Microlearning prevents you from exposing your employees to lengthy training materials such as handbooks, manuals, guides, etc. It limits the amount of content consumed by your employees daily to make learning flexible, scalable, and highly effective. 

Microlearning involves using a centralized digital platform on which the management can add all relevant training materials that can be easily accessed by employees working from any location. It is a simple and straightforward way of providing training and development to your remote employees in a post-COVID world. 

After the global pandemic, the practice of hiring dedicated trainers and organizing seminars or workshops has reduced significantly. With microlearning, you can find an alternative way of getting your employees trained without the need for trainers and workshops. Whether you want your new employees to learn skills required to perform their jobs well, up-skill existing employees, or train them in new technologies emerging in the market, microlearning ensures that you can provide personalized training to your employees. 

Benefits Of Microlearning

Here are some of the significant benefits of microlearning with respect to training your remote employees: 

1. High Flexibility
   
   As opposed to on-premise training sessions, microlearning provides your management and employees with high flexibility. It allows your employees to get trained irrespective of the locations from which they work. Here, the training sessions are not bound to specific hours and places. Users can access training materials at any time according to their convenience.
   
   
2. In Sync With Limited Attention Span
   
   Over time, the attention span of individuals has reduced significantly. This is because of the excessive consumption of microblogging platforms. Employees today are not willing to read long manuals and watch long videos to get trained. If they are exposed to such formats, they tend to forget the information learned quickly.
   
   Microlearning allows you to cater to the limited attention span of your employees. Instead of spending hours, they can train every day by spending not more than ten minutes of their time. As the content is limited, they can easily consume it without getting intimidated by its length.
   
   
3. Increased Retention Of Information
   
   When you provide bite-sized training content to your employees, they tend to retain the information better. This increases the effectiveness of the training provided to remote employees. Moreover, microlearning facilitates easy and frequent revisions whenever your employees want to go back and look at specific sessions again. In all, microlearning makes for a wholesome training program where the users can grasp more information.
   
   
4. Cost-effective Training
   
   Microlearning allows organizations to save a fortune that would otherwise have been spent hiring trainers and organizing dedicated training sessions. Here, all dissemination of information is digitally through a single unified platform. This helps you save a substantial amount of money that can be used for other productive purposes.
   
   
5. Eco-friendly Training
   
   We live in an age where corporations worldwide are taking initiatives to preserve natural resources and undertake measures that help us save the environment. Microlearning is a fairly eco-friendly mode of training and development. It does not require organizations to use excessive paper and other relevant materials for training their employees. It makes the entire process paperless, facilitating sustainable and eco-friendly training sessions.
   
   
6. Promoting Self-reliance
   
   Microlearning encourages your employees to learn new skills and get themselves trained without being dependent on trainers. This allows them to get self-reliant in their approach and train themselves remotely. The feeling of self-reliance boosts the morale of your employees and makes them confident. This leads to increased engagement and productivity of your employees within the organization.
   
   Moreover, microlearning allows your employees to resolve their issues, motivating them to give their best in what they do and helping you attain the common organizational goals.
   
   
7. Applying The Lessons Learned Right Away
   
   With microlearning, your employees can apply the lessons learned immediately. In most cases, the platform used for training is the same as that used for working. This allows employees to test their skills and apply their knowledge to their work right away.
   
   Moreover, microlearning helps your employees test the effectiveness of the training content and the platform used for sharing content as they can apply the lessons without any delay. This helps the management to make necessary changes to leverage the microlearning processes.
   
   
8. No Beating Around The Bush
   
   The training content shared via microlearning is highly precise and to the point. It allows you to convey the crux of the lessons to be taught without providing any background information that is not necessary. Today, employees are unwilling to spend their time reading or watching content that does not directly drive the point home. With microlearning, you can get to the point immediately, hooking your employees in right away.
   
   
9. Staying Relevant
   
   Microlearning is a fairly new way of training remote employees and allows you to stay relevant to the trends prevailing in the industry. Based on the new skills and technologies introduced in the market, you can update the training resources provided to your employees. This helps your team stay ahead of the curve and relevant to the predominant industry trends.
   
   

Using Microlearning To Leverage Training And Development Of Remote Workforce

It often becomes challenging for the management to get the remote employees trained as there is no direct supervision and physical contact. Microlearning allows you to bridge this gap with the help of using the right technology. 

Here are some of the most productive ways in which you can leverage the training and development of your remote employees with the help of microlearning: 

1. Integration With Collaborative Platforms
   
   Remote working is almost impossible without the use of collaborative platforms. Especially since the COVID crisis, organizations across the world have implemented online collaborative platforms to set up virtual organizations and facilitate seamless internal communication. If you are willing to optimize microlearning, you can integrate the same with your collaborative platform. This would involve the management adding training resources to the enterprise knowledge base that users can access from their respective work locations. This makes remote work better and centralizes employee training and development.
   
   
   
   
2. Encourage Peer-to-peer Training
   
   Microlearning can be used to encourage peer-to-peer training by allowing senior employees to share training resources with their peers. Your employees know their job the best, and sharing their notes, experiences, and advice would help their peers get a better perspective on the skills to be learned and the resources to be accessed. This also allows you to develop inclusive and cordial work culture.
   
   
3. Use Engaging Content Formats
   
   Although the length of the content shared through microlearning is limited, it is always advisable to use content formats that are engaging and easy to understand for your employees. Instead of providing them with plain text, make sure you use images, videos, animations, flow charts, and other content formats that make training sessions more interactive. This would improve the learning experience of your employees and help them remember the concepts learned better.
   
   
4. Optimize Microlearning With AI And Machine Learning
   
   Using technologies like AI and machine learning helps you leverage the overall effectiveness of microlearning. Using an AI-based platform for training your employees allows you to keep track of their progress and derive valuable insights from the training sessions conducted. AI-based platforms help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of specific employees as they keep taking lessons. They grow with every lesson your employees learn and provide them with suggestions that make their subsequent sessions more productive.
   
   Technologies like AI and machine learning act as virtual assistants to your remote workforce, thereby compensating for the lack of dedicated trainers and on-premise training sessions.
   
   

The Final Word 

The trend of remote working has provided organizations across all major industries with opportunities to optimize modern technologies and leverage the digital learning experience. Microlearning checks all boxes to provide flexible, scalable, and cost-effective training to your employees. Irrespective of the scale you operate, it is advisable to implement digitized training within your organization to get your remote workforce trained.