How to Train Employees to Work from Home?

While most experts believe the worst is behind us, we are still living in a world severely impacted by COVID-19. The pandemic has changed the way businesses operate, and even as many reopen or start to resume normal operations, it may be advisable for employees to continue working from home.

Employees who don’t typically work from home or remotely may need training.

There is a lot of e-Learning and employee training platforms like Moodle that make it easier and more flexible to facilitate training from anywhere.

Now could be a time to reskill your workforce to reflect the changing times and the changing business environment. The following are tips to train your employees to work from home, especially if it’s entirely new to them.

Identify Challenges

There are a lot of benefits of having employees work remotely, even outside of the situation we’re facing right now. Employees also tend to prefer it in many cases, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without challenges.

Before you train your employees, you should identify challenges.

You may have discovered more than you even realized as employees were quickly thrust into working from home during COVID-19. Now that things have settled down a bit, you can use those identified challenges to create specific training.

Soft Skills

Your employees may already have a grasp of the hard skills needed to do their job, and those may not change much whether they’re working remotely or not.

Soft skills could be the area where you need to put more emphasis during training.

For example, employees will have to learn more about time management and how to be organized when working on their own.

You may need to train employees on the best ways to communicate via email or instant messenger platforms.

You might also need to train employees on what the expectations are for them when they’re working remotely, so there’s clarity.

Some employers even provide training and access to resources related to employees’ mental health geared in particular toward the challenges that may arise when working remotely, such as isolation.

As you’re training employees to work remotely, you want to ensure there’s clarity in their role, based on what they did in the office and what they’re expected to do in the future. It can be hard sometimes for employees who work remotely to see how their job connects with the roles of others and what it’s place is in the whole of the organization, so ensure it’s well-defined and part of training.

Accessing Resources

The resources that employees need to access to do their job may be a challenge for them to access when they work remotely.

Employees need to be thoroughly trained on all the technology platforms they are expected to use, and they also need to know how to properly and safely access relevant data and work documents.

Technology training is extremely important for remote employees because, without an understanding of how to use all the necessary training, workers aren’t going to be as productive as they could be otherwise.

Cybersecurity Training

When employees work onsite, the employer has a lot of control over cybersecurity. This control is lost when employees work remotely.

Employees need to be trained on how to keep all information secure, how to keep passwords secure, and what to do in the event that a device is lost.

You’ll have to train employees on how to keep their devices virus-free, and also on things such as avoiding phishing scams.

Compliance requirements may look different when employees are working remotely, and this may be an area of your training you have to update most often, especially with changes stemming from coronavirus.

Maintain Company Culture

It’s really important when employees are physically dispersed that you still maintain a sense of cohesive corporate culture. Include this as part of your regular training and development.

For example, send out regular updates and company news as part of your training, or consider implementing an intranet to keep everyone on the same page.

Measure the progress remote employees are making in their training and their work in general, and check-in with them just like you would if they were physically present in the office.

If employees are going to be working in public spaces, they need to understand the additional layers of security that have to happen too. For example, many employees may not understand the risks of using public Wi-Fi, so don’t overestimate the knowledge employees have about cybersecurity outside of the traditional workplace.