The early months of 2020 are representative of how the future of workplace learning is changing. Even without the voluntary (or involuntary) necessity of working at home during the unforeseen global pandemic, more people are working remotely than ever before. In recent research, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 25% of wage and salary people work remotely full time and 15% work from home part time. That means over 40% of the workforce is already working remotely and current circumstances will not slow the pace of this change in workforce demographics. In fact, these events are accelerating fundamental changes in how people view the traditional office versus expanding to virtual alternatives.
Most of the discussions around remote work focuses on keeping a healthy culture, how to remain connected, staying focused, and being productive. But there isn't enough attention towards the need for remote learning to support a remote workforce. People can do their work on their own, but they need to know the framework, rules, goals and operating procedures of that work. Without a strong remote learning strategy, self-directed work leads to mixed results.
Remote learning isn’t a new concept. For example, the traditional LMS has been around forever to support people who can’t be reached by classroom learning. But offering a variety of SCORM courses and a portal for people to download documents isn’t working, especially when working remotely. What’s needed is a transformed approach to learning where the most important information gets delivered to the learner so they can do their jobs properly and not get distracted by so many other things in the real and digital world. This becomes more of a challenge when people are working remotely. Without solving this problem, the distance between people and their offices only gets wider.
Here are some ways to create a remote learning strategy designed to close the distance between the office and its remote people.
The traditional classroom setting is out of date and is too expensive to facilitate as frequently as in the past. Instead, transition to a variety of eLearning methods that are proven to drive learner engagement. An LMS has never been successful at engaging learners, in fact it causes learners to shy away. Managers can only see when a course is completed, but it doesn’t prove anyone has learned anything.
Learners are forced to take more courses, but studies have proven that most people forget a staggering amount of what they set out to learn. Learner engagement is the act of getting someone to focus on a learning exercise and proving that they actually understand the content that’s presented to them. This requires a different approach in a digital age because learning professionals struggle to capture people’s attention. Without a plan, it’s difficult to capture the learner's attention in a work setting with all the distractions and even more difficult in a remote work setting because they are distant.
How should remote learning work to drive engagement in ways that the traditional LMS doesn’t? Here are five best practices to support remote learning:
One of the biggest obstacles in traditional learning, especially for remote learners, is that it’s not engaging nor motivating. Learners view traditional learning as a distraction from their day-to-day responsibilities, so they go through the motions and don’t learn from the experience.
Designing and presenting learning content as a challenge drives competition by:
Scenario-based challenges present the most important content in a format that successfully competes for learner engagement. If learning isn’t delivered with challenge questions, content is set to fail and will not be retained.
There is too much content for people to consume and not enough time. It’s tedious for people to sit through long SCORM courses and retain any knowledge. This essentially force-feeds learners too much knowledge at once, making them sort through all the details of a long session to find out what’s most important. At the same time, the internet gives us unprecedented power to distribute information, but this creates a digital junk drawer in which all the information you need to know is now mixed in with information you don’t need to know.
Remote learners don’t need more content, they need the right content. This requires a transformation in how learning content is created and delivered for remote learners. Here are microlearning best practices to transform information into learning content that will have an impact on performance:
A well-designed microlearning program takes away any excuse that people have to remain disengaged. This is especially true when it comes to remote learning. Remote learners rely on receiving this information to understand and align with the critical concepts and knowledge necessary to drive organizational objectives.
Delivering content using the spacing effect helps make sure learners aren’t overwhelmed by information overload. Through repetition and knowledge reinforcement, learners are able to overcome the forgetting curve that many learners face today.
Here’s how best practice knowledge reinforcement works:
Keeping managers personally involved in the learning process is important for remote learning. It’s a manager’s responsibility to have an understanding of their team's knowledge and skills to provide them with key information on where strengths and weaknesses exist.
Too often managers find out that their people have learning gaps after the fact, when they can’t do anything about it. Microlearning programs provide coaching dashboards for managers to:
Managers use these dashboards to connect with remote people and their teams to coach in real-time. Coaching actions should be taken when managers look at learning activities and performance data to guide people in building the knowledge and skills they need to perform at their best.
5. Proficiency Analytics Measure the Skill Growth of Remote Learners
Traditional learning metrics are not effective at portraying whether the learner is engaged with the materials presented, gained proficiency in the subject of the training, and whether their skills improved and transferred to behavior change.
LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report describes this challenge clearly. It’s findings suggest that organizations use measures like “qualitative feedback from employees,” “number of courses completed online,” and “number of employees who learn consistently online” to determine the success of learning investments. But these measures are tragically flawed because they demonstrate activity, not proficiency gain or learning. This is why the $200 billion corporate learning and development market doesn’t achieve expected learning outcomes and demonstrable return on learning investment.
Traditional training courses require a significant amount of time to complete, taking away from productivity, and disengages learners. Tracking course completion and activity does not provide valuable information and whether people actually learned something, which cannot be correlated to on the job performance.This measure of performance is valuable for the entire organization but is especially helpful in remote learning to understand and act on people’s knowledge gaps, learning opportunities and skills development.
Learning is important for increasing knowledge about the business, job and skills needed to perform successfully. In the case of compliance training, learner engagement isn’t optional: it’s a requirement. Here are some ways that best practice microlearning is effective in supporting compliance training for all people even those who are remote:
Compliance training is required for all employee audiences. This approach to training is different from results generated by traditional methods. Now, organizations have certainty that knowledge was gained through the compliance training exercise with proof of the return on investment from people actually learning something in the process.
The days of managers and their employees sitting together in an office every day are over. Organizations that embrace the new methods of remote learning described here will have a competitive advantage when it comes to overall benefits for their employees. The time for this evolution isn’t something to contemplate in the future, the remote workforce and its demand for the new remote learning is immediate.
If you’re interested in improving engagement of remote people, request a demo to learn more how Qstream’s best-practice microlearning platform increases learner engagement, improves knowledge retention, and provides learning analytics for your remote learning programs.