Common Remote Training mistakes and how to avoid them

Viren Kapadia Jun 04, 2020
Common Remote Training mistakes and how to avoid them

In most companies, until very recently, training and development sessions used to be conducted in a classroom-style environment. However, few companies are now waking up to the reality of having to develop remote training capabilities due to the growing trend of employees choosing to work from home or from diverse locations. And while they are now making efforts towards developing those capabilities, the lack of experience means they are making mistakes on multiple fronts, which are unsurprisingly common across the board. The article briefly lists down such mistakes and ways in which they could be worked around:

Structuring Training as an activity to be undergone in Discrete Steps

A lot of companies continue to view training through a very traditional mindset, as knowledge that has to percolate down from trainers to trainees assembled together in a classroom. However, in an era of rapid changes in the corporate world, such an approach is bound to soon leave your workforce under-trained to compete. Therefore, it is advisable to develop a training schedule focusing on continuous incremental upskilling of employees in line with the market changes.

Unclear Goal-Setting

Employees would not be motivated to acquire new knowledge if there is inadequate information regarding expected learning outcomes. As such, it is imperative for managers to communicate to their teams the purpose behind conducting a training session, what skills the team members stand to gain by undergoing the training, how such upskilling will empower them to work better and deliver better results, and consequently, how they stand to benefit themselves.

Neglecting Trainee Feedback

Learning is a two-way process, and the importance of feedback from trainees is extremely important in terms of deciding whether a training module is structured optimally or there need to be changes to it. By not calling for such feedback or not heeding to it, companies run the risk of continuing on with training programs that are not best-designed. Moreover, if such feedback is not acknowledged, trainees might begin to feel a sense of lack of importance, which could impact their morale negatively. Companies need to design remote training programs in a manner that are receptive of trainee feedback, by which they understand the reception of training sessions by trainees, how useful the session was perceived, and what could be improved upon in terms of training module content or structure.

Not adopting the use of a Learning Management System

There are multiple factors which encumber the conduction of effective remote training sessions, one of which is being unable to track employee attentiveness during the session, checking their knowledge retention, and being unable to facilitate seamless communication between trainers and trainees. A well-designed LMS can help address such shortcomings in remote training, however, a lot of companies are loath to adoption of such futuristic technologies. In the post COVID-19 era, only such companies which have taken the opportunity to develop, deploy, and utilize LMS in their organizations will emerge with better equipped workforces. It isn’t that the aforementioned mistakes or ways to address them aren’t intuitive enough to be known to most company managements. However, what plagues them is their resistance to change and improvement, which often is the difference of high-performing companies and also-rans. The experience of several clients who have tried out the Gyrus LMS for their training and development has proven how effectively using an LMS helps in overcoming roadblocks to effective training of employees. It isn’t for nothing that leading organizations such as Century Aluminium, The Portland Clinic, Lufthansa, and the US Air Force have come to depend on the Gyrus LMS for their training needs.