Virtual employee training can be a chore if you don’t know exactly what to do. We are going to share with you our 5-step method for great results.
After going through all the hiring process and interviews, it is exciting to finally meet someone who hits all the checkmarks of qualification that you require for your future employee. You make the offer and they accept. Yeah! As excited as you are, they are excited too!
Now we have to prepare for them and get them trained and ready. You may ask “‘what is the best way to provide training for my virtual employee?” To help we have collected some useful tips and plans that you can create prior to meeting your virtual employee for the first day of work.
Introduction
A highly skilled and experienced candidate knows little about you, your company, and the required elements on the first day. They are being introduced to a whole new environment. They are excited and nervous and this can make them feel intimidated and overwhelmed. There are new faces, tons strange information, and work styles to become familiar with.
We recommend spending a few hours planning your training agenda ahead of time. On their first day provide the agenda for the week and your training structure as a roadmap that they can follow as a guide. You should start with a company profile that explains about you, your company, and the role that they play in your business. It will require that you invest with your time gathering all the necessary information about your business and its history, your vision and mission statements, the people involved in your business, and maybe even some amusing trivia to help them feel informed and welcome as part of the team.
Understanding Expectations
Certainly, you want your virtual employee to be very productive. Realize however that it takes time to fully understand their role and what you want them to do. We highly recommend you set goals and objectives for your virtual employee from the very beginning. We recommend weekly and monthly goals, in the beginning, to help your virtual employee understand what is expected of him or her. Having these written goals helps you manage your virtual employee and helps them to self-evaluate their own performance. If you need more help in setting performance goals, you can read more about it. We also help you determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in a previous article.
Visualize
Watching the news on television is more interesting than hearing it through radio because 70% of people respond to visual stimuli. For this reason, we recommend creating a simple yet informative demonstration of the required tasks to help your virtual employee for their training. You can also create checklists for the tasks as it may also serve as their quick reference for work. If you have a short video that can reference a certain topic, you also add it to your presentation to spice up the lesson make it more interesting to learn. In addition, have sample tasks that they can get started with the reinforce the learning. The good news is once you have created these training modules, you shouldn’t have to do them again for the future.
Organize
Once you have created the training modules, you should organize each one by topic then put them into the order required for viewing. The better organized you are, the easier it will be for your virtual employee to find the training again if he or she ever needs a refresher. The better organized and logical your training is, the better results you will have. Taking the time, in the beginning, will save you time later if you bring on a new staff member or if you must make a replacement.
Quizzes/ Activities
Quizzes and activities reinforce the learning process. If you can plan some practice exercises for your virtual employee to work on that relate to the training they have just received it will cement the concept and retention will be that much higher. We recommend you start with activities that will not impact the business function until your virtual staff member demonstrates a full understanding of the concept. Once they have, then you can move forward with a more “real world” experience.
If you take the time to set up your training program as part of your new hire process, it will benefit you greatly in the long term. While the task may seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. Assuming you or someone in your organization is already doing these tasks, all you need to do is invest in a screen capture software and then record someone doing the task when they are already working. After that, it is as simple as organizing the screen captures into a folder and making sure those folders are labeled appropriately.
If you have ever considered hiring a virtual employee, but don’t know where to begin, we have helped many businesses shorten the learning curve in hiring and managing remote staff. You and book an appointment to speak with us and we are happy to help.