The Challenge with Employee Training During Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

As the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to spread across the globe, with it comes uncertainty, confusion, and sometimes fear. Companies are scrambling to figure out how to minimize the impact to the bottom-line as much as possible and how to shift from the Brick and Mortar business model to a Work at Home model during this time of challenge.

Many of my Linkedin contacts have been reaching out to me asking for insight and direction on how they can minimize the impact to staff development and new-hire training as they migrate through significant change. As a result, I felt prompted to write this brief article in hopes that it will help others in their transition efforts from classroom to virtual learning.

This uncertainty gives employers the opportunity of freedom to innovate and experiment. Mind you, not every creative training solution will be the perfect fit for the company. Some will work for your employee base and others will not.

The most effective means for developing innovative training techniques is through Gamification and interactive quizzes, which can easily be applied as part of any virtual training solution. Gamification and interactive quizzes will hold the learner’s attention and motivate them to complete the course.

Learner feedback is a critical part of every staff training session. By applying feedback throughout the training learners will participate more actively and it will also help virtual trainers stay on top of needed areas of opportunity and engagement.

Virtually assist new-hire in the completion of their HR paperwork. This can be time consuming so you will need to factor in enough time to accomplish everything that needs to be done (review, print, scan, sign, etc.). Always offer digital handouts.

Virtual/Remote employees are still a part of the culture. Training needs to be designed and delivered in a way that they feel included in the culture and are an essential part of the success of the organization.

Schedule a 1:1 phone call between each learner and the organization’s IT Department. During this training IT staff should familiarize new-hires with file sharing applications and cloud back-up, computer security, password management, data security, virtual outage and equipment issues support, etc.

Trainers should schedule 1:1 meetings with each new-hire or staff member undergoing training and development. This helps the trainer identify each learner’s strengths, opportunities, and enables them to pair strong learners with struggling learners, as well as assist struggling learner with their success plan.

Set clear expectations – Working in a remote setting can be challenging, confusing and unclear. To set your new-hires up for success it is imperative that all communication is clear and concise, that all expectations are set on Day 1 of training and followed up continually, especially when it comes to training start times and attendance. It is also just as important to set learning expectations – and following up those expectations by verifying that the learners have a solid understanding of what tasks they will tackle and other learning requirements.

Make sure that each learner is achieving their daily and weekly learning goals. Integrate performance into the learner’s Success Plan. Establish a suitable training schedule to ensure maximum participation. Monitor in training time to ensure all learners are adhering to required training timelines.

Follow-up with a daily email that recaps and summarizes the day’s key topics, assignments/homework assigned. Send the emails to both the learner’s personal email and company email accounts. Always follow-up to make sure every learner received the daily summary.

Integrate a chat community within the training class where learners, trainers, subject matter experts and mentors can communicate, and where learners can ask questions specific to the training content and activities.

There is so much more that goes into setting up a virtual learning environment. Making sure all employees and new-hires have access to the internet, have a computer that has the right speed, etc. Hopefully the majority of learners have these capabilities. Another consideration would be to design and develop training to be delivered via ones Smart Phone. Either way, by applying the above you are well on your way to providing a successful and effective learning experience for your virtual learners.