How To Ace Remote Workforce Training

The world has transformed a lot recently and we’ve got to change with it. And I was reading through a Harvard Business Review article recently and it said this, although it is always preferable to establish clear remote work policies and training in advance in times of crisis or other rapidly changing circumstances, this level of preparation is prepared, as we sometimes hear. And this is where suddenly the majority of the workforce of many organisations and this is true for us here at what fixed, it’s no longer in an office, it’s now remote. And so how do you deal with that? And specifically for us here today? How do you train and support your workforce, on the software solutions they use to do their jobs when they’re now remote because it’s very different? Gone is the ability to look over your shoulder or to walk over to the IT department or to support that all is impossible anymore. You’ve got to collaborate remotely, you’ve got to get those answers remotely, you got to find what you’re looking for remotely. Now, this isn’t new, remote work has increased 91% Over the past 10 years. So this is a trend we’ve been on. That’s a quote according to the global workplace, analytics and flex jobs. But it has currently recently had a huge jolt. And it’s estimated that at the moment, roughly two to 3 billion people are working from home across the world. And some experts actually predict that the Coronavirus, this crisis situation right now will impact business operations for many years, and work from home will continue to rise in popularity. And so what you can’t do is say, well, we’ll just muddle through, we’ll make it through this time. And then we’ll be okay. What you have to do is you have to figure out a solution that not only will help you during this crisis time but will be in place for the new normal that the crisis is bringing about. And really, you only recognise the full breadth of the challenge here. When you look at the larger picture of your tech stacks, they’re very large. According to a study by Symantec, the average enterprise uses 1516 cloud-based applications. That’s a surprisingly large number for me. And it was for CIOs as well, that’s nearly 40 times greater than what most CEOs thought their organisations were using. So if you think that number is way high for your organisation, it may be, but you probably have a more complex tech stack than you think you do. So you have dozens, hundreds of applications like these. You have a distributed workforce, maybe it’s global, mostly, if not entirely, working remotely and with instructor-led classroom training out of the question, how do you make sure your employees are trained across all these applications? How do you get them the information they need when they need it? Because remote workers can’t find the information they need or when can’t find the information they need. They turn to the support desk and with call centre closures support staff get sick or work remotely themselves. Enterprise support resources to help your remote employees can be limited.

How can you ensure effective remote employee training?

End users learning preferences have rapidly changed and what software users want is learning in the flow of work, they want what they need, at the point that they need it. They want point-of-need learning contextual support, and they want it throughout their lifecycle with the software solutions they’re using. And so the Linkedin workplace learning report from 2018, said at that time, 58% of employees really do prefer that they prefer to learn at their own pace and convenience. 70% of actual learning happens through practice and on informal channels. Most employees don’t have the ability today to learn in the flow of work. They need to use informal channels. So their way of learning through the in the flow of work, maybe to tap on somebody’s shoulder or to chat somebody in this current environment, because they don’t have what they need at their fingertips when they’re using the solutions. And so actual learning is happening through that as well as through practice. And with Whatfix, we’ll look at you know, certainly now being integrated into the tool, our solution, you’re able to learn through practice while getting what you see in those first two points of learning at your own pace commands and learning when you need it. Video-based learning doesn’t necessarily lead to great retention. For most people, documentation is too boring to read. It’s really about learning in the flow of work and contextual learning. So how do you provide that to your employees? You overlay a digital adoption solution to improve onboarding to decrease the time spent on executing tasks and reduce money spent on additional training. So how can a digital adoption platform like Whatfix enable remote working effectively? Well, it starts with remote user onboarding, onboarding new users onto the application, helping them to get in there and understand what it is that they can do and need to do with the application training them. It’s embedded training, it’s guidance that’s there at all times they using the application, that force statistic of 20%, searching for information, self serve contextual help right there in the application and then change management. Well, that’s great, but you’ve got to train your users on those things, you got to let them know about those things.

How Digital Adoption Solutions can help?

When you roll out a new software solution, you see that are they on the engagement and productivity axis at go live, you’re kind of at that highest point where you’ve trained people, they’re ready for go live. After that initial heavy training phase, even if you’re doing that today via you know, video or remotely or whatever, after those initial phases, kind of in the old world and in the new world, that training generally reduces and it tends to become learned, learn on your own, ask your peers, learn from online content, or even talk to support and because of that engagement tends to really just decrease over time.

The Digital Adoption platform will augment your user training and increase your training effectiveness and using that personalising contextualised help and automating workflows.

The solution is not limited by any means of those. And in fact, it doesn’t have to be a commercially available application.

Whenever you use a new application for the first time, it’s not always clear what you should do and that’s where digital adoption solutions come into the picture. Digital adoption solutions help users get onboard effectively and train efficiently on the tech stack. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix use Guided Walkthroughs, Self Help, Task list and Automating workflows to guide them through the complete onboarding aspect.