Remote work has become more and more popular in recent years. However, this concept isn't new as well as online learning. But the pandemic has made these phenomena the standard because every company has been able to test these concepts in practice and see their undeniable advantages.
Employees are not always ready to return to the office on a full-time job. Therefore, companies are shifting to a hybrid model when office work and remote work are combined. It combines the best practices of team management and employee development.
However, if the company finally switches to a hybrid schedule with corporate training plans, then the employee hybrid learning should be consistent. You can adapt an existing program or create employee training from scratch. But designing an effective hybrid learning plan is no easy task. Let's consider the benefits of hybrid training and analyze six simple steps to create a successful training strategy.
Benefits of Hybrid Corporate Training
Hybrid learning provides many new opportunities for workers. Students can improve their productivity and develop healthy habits through efficient hands-on activities. Here are the top 5 benefits of hybrid corporate training.
- Using the principles of experiential employee hybrid learning. In this way, hybrid plans differ from classical briefings, which concern the learning of theoretical knowledge. A practical approach allows you to not only develop the necessary skills. It also encourages students to change their way of completing specific tasks.
- Compliance with actual business processes. It distinguishes hybrid learning from classic virtual instructor-led training (VILT). The reason is quite simple: it allows your employees to apply their knowledge here and now. In this case, you can use both tasks that affect the business and simulations.
- Increase team cohesion. Not every type of distance learning can bring a team together. But employee hybrid learning is quite capable of doing this. Using the trial-and-error method, students fail first and then turn to their colleagues for help (they possibly have not collaborated before). As a result, they compare their experiences and help each other.
- The fun of the learning process. Gaining new knowledge should be fun. Therefore, it is not uncommon for hybrid corporate training plans to include game mechanics, visual elements, or business environment modeling. It creates a fun and exciting process, allowing students to acquire new knowledge and skills qualitatively.
- Using unique techniques to preserve knowledge. Quite often, employee training is designed around the forgetting curve. They include only ordinary video viewing or text reading and regular repetition of information. Such an approach will help assimilate vital knowledge and retain it in long-term memory.
These advantages help to combine traditional methods with an online environment qualitatively and create corporate training plans that actually work. However, any curriculum should also include learning outcomes.
What Should Be the Possible Learning Outcomes
There can be one or more learning outcomes in the plan. Here are examples of specific goals for hybrid corporate training:
- Improving leadership qualities by developing vital character traits for a healthy corporate culture. It will allow students to reach new heights within the department and the company.
- Increasing the productivity and experience of the personnel. More specific results can be an increase in the speed and effectiveness of projects, a decrease in stress levels, and the creation of conditions for the development of employees, regardless of social signs.
- Strengthening the involvement of employees. If an employee can name his manager as one of the primary company values, it shows a high level of corporate culture.
- Improve business performance by aligning your hybrid corporate learning plan with your company's current strategy and needs.
All these aspects are crucial for business development. Therefore, you should think carefully about the goals of employee hybrid learning.
6 Steps to Create a Corporate Training Plan
At first, it seems impossible to develop an effective curriculum. But if you understand in which direction to move, you will succeed. Let's look at six steps for creating or adapting a corporate training plan.
Assess Your Needs
Despite the general transition of the business to an online environment, the concept of a hybrid schedule is different in each company. Therefore, it is not always obvious what your employees need to be able to build and implement an effective business strategy.
First and foremost, you should analyze the level of preparation of your employees and their current knowledge. Next, find out which skills are most in-demand in your industry. Then, it is better to ask the employees' opinions on what they want to know or study for further work. The last aspect is the ratio of the training format (office/remote). The feedback you receive will help you create relevant content and deliver it in the best possible way. This approach will allow you to analyze the current and future students' needs.
If your content does not meet the requirements of the students, they can quickly forget what they learned before. Therefore, it is vital to assess the needs of the business and satisfy them with the help of high-quality training of employees. You also need to review the corporate training plans regularly. After all, content should always correspond to the business goals and the audience.
Focus On Improving Communication Within Your Team
As in any other case, disagreements can also arise in a hybrid team. The reasons are different, from different views on the task to personal conflicts. Many companies prefer to develop interpersonal communication through special training sessions.
You should take the creation of a communication curriculum seriously. It should consider all issues related to your team. For example, you can work out the skills of email correspondence or work in instant messengers. At first, there is nothing easier than writing a letter. However, its proper design directly affects the efficiency of the hybrid team and avoids conflicts between employees.
Put Yourself in the Student’s Shoes
You may not always be able to follow your corporate training plan and clearly define what is needed to maintain and increase the employees' productivity. It is especially noticeable in hybrid teams, where employees have different experience levels and preferences regarding acquiring new knowledge.
Before developing a curriculum, you should learn more about the students' problems and the most critical issues. For example, what do your students need to master new skills? At what stage do they understand that they need to improve their current abilities to increase personal productivity? When will they be ready to share their experience with other people?
Plus, remember about a human-centered approach when creating the training plan. It will help to prioritize and adapt it to hybrid corporate learning. That is how students can easily find answers to their questions in a constant stream of information.
Customize Content for Your Employees
As we said earlier, online learning is an excellent choice for teams worldwide. However, it should not be the only way to learn. After all, you probably have employees who can come to the office.
Employees probably have their schedules and a corporate training plan assigned to them, which directly affects all processes in the company. Therefore, be sure to take this into account when creating courses.
For example, some learning materials may be asynchronous (that is, students can review them at any convenient time). It will be helpful for both office workers and remote workers who find it complicated to find time for self-study. Allow employees to focus on vital tasks and access the educational platform only when they can concentrate. This approach helps to remember much more new information.
In addition, you can apply a microlearning strategy to increase student engagement. Dividing the program into short sessions increases concentration and memorization of new knowledge. Again, ordinary psychology works here: a person can better remember one concept at a time than a dozen in an hour and a half lesson.
Interact With Your Audience
Your content should be valuable for all employees. But it is equally important to understand how the place of work affects the quality of tasks. Therefore, you must work with each student individually and help learn the nuts and bolts of their position.
For example, content for a remote team might include online customer service sessions. You can also tell how to concentrate on working from home or being effective in the office. However, there is one obligatory concept for everyone - cybersecurity. After all, the success of the entire company depends on the correct behavior of each employee on the web.
In any case, you must constantly interact with the audience. It will allow you to create consistent and valuable content for each employee and understand if you need to develop unique courses for specific teams.
Choose a Modern Learning Management Platform
Every company that shifts to a hybrid work model understands the importance of eLearning. In this case, the approach depends on each specific team. For example, some people like to take courses in the office, while others like to watch videos online at any convenient time. The latter option is excellent for teams that work in different time zones.
But despite the convenience of employee hybrid learning, eLearning creates problems for organizers if they do not stick to corporate training plans. So, training in the office depends entirely on logistics. And if you regularly run classes for different teams and constantly monitor their progress, you face new difficulties.
A quality LMS will help solve this problem. It allows you to create engaging and dynamic eLearning courses compatible with a hybrid approach. So, you can attend classes in the office and do practical work online. Plus, convenient analytics tools will help you easily track progress in employee training. For example, you can create the first module in just 30 minutes.
Conclusion
Let's sum it up briefly. Hybrid corporate training has many nuances, so you should seriously develop a curriculum and apply it to practice. However, a high-quality adaptation of existing programs or starting from scratch has advantages. It allows you to guarantee the successful development of the company. Moreover, students can increase the personal efficiency and productivity of the entire team.
We hope that you found our article helpful. If you have any questions about corporate training plans, leave them in the comments. We will answer and consider the most interesting ones in the following articles.