Whether your team is grouped together across multiple locations or they’re working from home, and whether its been this way for years or you’re new to managing a dispersed workforce, it’s important to regularly evaluate what’s working and what’s not.
Although the benefits of having a decentralized workforce are numerous, the challenges that coincide with it can be difficult to deal with if a company is ill-equipped to manage the people, technology, and brand across multiple locations.
Let’s break down some of the struggles involved with having a dispersed workforce, and how you can approach them to ensure everything stays connected and running smoothly.
The biggest technical challenge of having remote workers and people using mobile devices is protecting sensitive data through cybersecurity measures. It doesn’t matter how big or small your organization is—every company has to take cybersecurity seriously. A breach can happen anywhere and to anyone, whether they’re working in a corporate office or a home office.
If the importance of complying with cybersecurity measures is lost on your employees, or they’re simply unaware of what they need to do to keep data safe online, consider how your cybersecurity training could be more effective. Keeping information secure online is not just the responsibility of IT anymore—you have to get everyone on board.
Compliance training in general, whether it’s cybersecurity, harassment, safety, HIPAA, or others, tends to just be a checkbox to mark off, without much focus on whether or not that training is being retained and creating behavior changes with employees—which is the goal of training, after all.
If you’re looking for compliance training that actually prevents infractions and protects your company from lawsuits, you need modern solutions that are about more than checking the “completed” box. Microlearning videos are powerful for delivering necessary training because they’re more engaging for learners and get key concepts across more efficiently than longer, traditional training. Rather than taking people off the job for an hour or more at a time, they fit within busy schedules, allowing training to happen when and where it’s needed. Combining these short bursts of training with post-training boosts of reinforcement promotes retention and increases the likelihood that the training will transfer to practice.
Along with finding effective online solutions for compliance training, a lot of headaches and mistakes can be circumvented by training managers and employees on the best ways to communicate across their dispersed team. They need to know they can count on each other; and building that trust requires everyone to do their best to communicate fully and clearly.
Check out this video to see how several BizLibrary clients were able to connect and engage their dispersed workforces through online employee training.