How to engage and train employees remotely | 6 strategies for leading and developing remote teams
Are you finding training and developing your teams in a remote working pattern challenging? You’re not alone. Fortunately, we’ve got 6 strategies to share with you to make the process just as efficient and effective as if you were all onsite.
Remote working offers amazing efficiency gains, both for your businesses, and for your employees, but it’s not without its challenges. Putting in place effective training programmes and systems to keep employees engaged in their work is essential to make the work-from-home model work for you.
1. Establish hard systems to minimise ambiguity
Onsite, either you or your senior member of staff sets the tone for how things work and the chain of command is in place to address queries and ambiguity. When everyone’s siloed into their home office, this automatic cultural benchmarker disappears.
You need to create clear and well-defined processes, protocols, and guidelines for remote working. Think about expectations, measuring productivity, and what’s in place to overcome blockers people have.
You should document all this and make the information accessible to all team members in an easy to digest format, and make it a part of the onboarding protocol for new hires. This reduces ambiguity, enhances productivity, and ensures a consistent approach to work across your team.
2. Invest in the project management software that serves your organisational needs
Identify and invest in the project management software that aligns with your precise organisational needs.
These tools should streamline task assignment, progress tracking, and facilitate collaboration among remote team members.
3. Use gamification to create a catalogue of courses for more suitable remote upskilling
Gamification is the application of game elements to non-gaming settings to enhance user engagement. In the most basic terms, think points, badges, and leaderboards, but in a more nuanced approach, think about how you can harness people’s competitive natures and desires for progress to achieve greater results. When you make something a game, people try harder. It’s as simple as that.
When it comes to corporate training, you can easily customise multi-step courses using formats like the Dynamic Path™. These cater to more learning types than traditional training materials, and offer greater engagement levels by allowing you to immerse your employees in work-related scenarios, so they can apply their newly acquired knowledge as part of the process. Users can progress at their own speed and in their home office, as they work digitally on any modern device, and don’t require a trainer, a specific room, or other people’s calendars to coincide to make the session cost-effective.
Pro tip: Creating gamified courses might sound technical and difficult, but this can be done easily by using modern gamification platforms like Drimify. Create a free account, watch our 7-minute masterclass, and start customising tried-and-tested game engines to see what’s possible.
4. Schedule regular video-call check-ins
Regular video calls may be a weekly one-on-one for each staff member to check they’re on track, or may be a weekly group for entire departments to touch base at whatever intervals are most appropriate.
These allow your employees to connect with one another in a more personal setting, to communicate face-to-face, and to generally break some of the barriers that exist when everyone is literally miles apart.
It can also allow some team members who aren’t as confident in their written work to clear up miscommunications that can result when everything is commented on documents and through emails and chat apps.
5. Promote soft skills like self-management and effective prioritising
You should also stress the importance of soft skills such as time management and self-management. When people work from home, they technically answer to their line manager, but only virtually. They have their work that they need to complete, or specific times that they need to be on-call or online, but they’re really managing themselves.
Encourage employees to engage in working best practices, and to develop the appropriate soft skills and management approaches. Approaches like the “4 Ds”: do tasks that require immediate attention, defer tasks that can wait, delegate tasks when appropriate, and drop tasks that are no longer relevant; and principles like touch paper once: literally performing the appropriate action to move a task along as soon as an email or communication is received, take the guesswork out of self management.
Pro tip: Soft skills, that is, skills that aren’t industry specific and are transferable, are ideal for gamification. You can customise multi-step courses of Quizzes that introduce soft skills, pose scenarios through videos and text, then ask questions that encourage users to engage with the ideas they’re learning about and apply them in realistic simulations.
Having courses that develop these soft skills will give you an upskilled internal talent pool and can feed into your employer branding. Offering training opportunities that allow candidates to improve themselves is extremely attractive to candidates looking for new opportunities.
6. Ensure the whole team meets in person on a regular basis
Even in a remote setup, organising in-person team meetings on a regular basis can have an enormous impact.
Face-to-face interactions, particularly on team building events or retreats involving activities that aren’t directly related to work, build trust and camaraderie among team members, and help foster a stronger team dynamic that will carry forward into remote work. It can bring back a level of inter-office banter that can naturally occur onsite under positive work cultures.
Key takeaway
The venue may have changed, but the need remains the same: you need to keep your people engaged and on task, and you need to find effective ways to train them and upskill them.
The 6 strategies listed here are all easily actionable, and will work for your business, regardless of what sector you operate in.
