Training New Employees to Work From Home
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As more and more of the workforce continues to work from home, this proposes a dilemma for how to train employees for managers especially. While training techniques for employees normally consists of having in-person training seminars as well as on-the job conversations, training a remote workforce can be difficult especially when employees or contractors are completely new to an organization. Small business owners especially may find that best practices for training new employees is an important part of the puzzle when growing a small business online.
Best Practices for Training New Employees
Training new employees requires that you understand the project’s scope, deadlines, and the estimated time to complete specific tasks. A best practice is to ensure that the employee or contractor has what they need in terms of training for company software, procedures, as well as organizational history, values, and internal communication channels. For example, if you require that your employee update their project status within a project management software such as Asana, Monday.com, JIRA, Trello, or other software, it’s important that their training incorporates how to navigate the system properly especially if they are completely new to the software. Recently I hired on several new contractors and created a series of online video trainings recorded through Loom and hosted the video in Vimeo to provide them with an adequate amount knowledge to navigate the system and update the progress of tasks within the software.
Keep Training Videos Short and Sweet
When supporting the ongoing efforts of training for your team, keep video lengths short, preferrably 7 minutes or less. This helps to keep the attention span of your employee as well as miniminize the associated time affiliated with developing training curriculum. This is especially true with training for software that often changes rapidly with software updates. Additionally this will help your staff, employees, and other contractors to quickly complete their daily tasks as well as complete their trainings without adding extra hours onto their workday. Let’s be honest, nobody likes to add an additional 2 hours to their workday when they have much more higher priority tasks to complete.
Provide Space For Feedback
There should always be a way to improve your training so that employees can effectively implement the tasks you require them to complete, so provide space for feedback either through an anonymous survey or through a different avenue. For example, when I created my Samepage Online Tutorial Training, I asked contractors within Samepage what was working and what wasn’t. I also asked them in 1:1 meetings if they could provide me with feedback on the training to help me better understand any necessary changes that needed to be completed for the project.
Give Access To Resources
- A brief history of the company
- An overview of the company’s primary services and programs and the people they serve
- An overview of the company values
- Designers should also have access to company branding guides, logos, and images of the company founder
- A contract outlining your expectations, deadlines, and non-disclosure agreements
Create a Skills Assessment
After your candidate moves forward and begins to work with you, make sure to properly assess their abilities by creating a skills assessment based on their role. Make sure to understand their experience with certain software programs and skillsets as well as get to understand their preferred types of tasks. This is especially true when it comes to working with contractors or employees on a longer term basis. For example, you could find out that your Web Designer only creates WordPress Websites and understands how to design using Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Brizy. Or you could find out that your copywriter can create marketing campaigns in Convertkit, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, and Mailerlite. Allowing your contractors and employees to provide that information up-front will help to better assign more projects and tasks based on their skills and expertise rather than asking each contractor or employee individually.
Conclusion
Training new team members can take a considerable amount of time, so it’s important to assess your level of availability before bringing someone on as a contractor. As a CEO, your job is to grow and expand your business and you should feel confident in your hiring decisions to hand off certain tasks. That being said, a certain level of training is needed up front to deliver a quality work that you need to run your company, agency, or small business. Once you create a repeatable online training program, it’ll be easier to continue to hire without worrying about answering the same questions time and again. If you’re worried that you don’t have enough time to commit to growing your team, make sure you reach out to ask your training questions by scheduling a brief 1:1 call.
