The Coronavirus outbreak has forced a lot of companies to suspend regular operations and instead, move their business online. While lockdowns are being eased around the world, many businesses continue to work remotely.
The fallout from all this is the impact it has had on training – employees and customers alike. The impact is conspicuous among high attrition industries like food delivery and on-demand cabs.
Companies like Uber and Postmates have teams dedicated to onboarding and training new delivery personnel. This is typically done face-to-face.
However, now a lot of these organizations are moving to “zero touch training” modules – where there is little manual interaction between the trainer and the trainee.
If your organization too is considering a zero touch training approach, this short guide will be helpful.
Understand your learner’s profile
Before you go ahead and build a training module for your contactless training program, take a moment to understand your learner’s profile.
The questions you must ask are:
- What is the average demographics of the learner (age, gender, income level, etc.)
- How does this person predominantly access the internet – computer, smartphone, tablet, etc.
- What is their average internet speed?
- How comfortable are they with technology?
- How many hours can they spend on training everyday?
- Can they speak your language with the same level of proficiency as you do?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you compile the right kind of training program.
A learner who is not comfortable with English may perhaps prefer a training program built in their native language. Someone who does not have a reliable internet may prefer if you didn’t have tons of video content to download.
If this is simply about affording quality internet or not savvy enough to upgrade themselves, you may consider paying for their internet.
The point is your zero touch training program is not simply about the content. It is also how you present it to the learner, and how easily they are able to access it.
Infrastructure & Tools
Start with your own web assets. Does your About Us page give a good description of what your business does, what your mission statement is, and so on? These are important elements to bring your new employees up to speed with your organization’s values.
Most zero touch training modules are conducted with the help of learning management tools like TalentLMS, Moodle and Litmos. They help you organize your content in the format of your preference.
But simply providing content is not sufficient. In most cases, you will need to provide support to your learners. There are a few ways to do this.
Virtual engagement
Engage with your learners on a regular basis to answer their questions, help them with the content, and perhaps train them on their work tasks. Apps like Angage can be useful in setting up online meetings, conference calls, organize Q&As, and so on. Very useful for interaction with your learners.
Pick tools with good documentation
A lot of work today gets done with third party tools and services. Consequently, businesses today seek applications from candidates who not just have industry experience, but are also knowledgeable with specific tools.
A marketing person today, for example, would be required to know how to use platforms like Hubspot or Marketo. The same is true for any other job role. The candidate’s knowledge of platforms like Mailchimp, Google Ads, Wix, etc. is useful to secure a job.
If you are however training someone with no prior experience, you may be better off onboarding them with a tool that has good native documentation. This way, you do not have to reinvent the wheel and produce elearning content yourself.
For example, if you are hiring a marketing manager for your mobile app, look for mobile marketing platforms with a comprehensive knowledge base on the subject. Your learner could directly access this content instead of having to rely on your onboarding content.
Keep experience native
It’s obvious – the objective of using various tools for business is to make life easier. So do not invest in platforms that have steep learning curves.
If you use Kanban for project management, for instance, do not find new tools that need onboarding. Instead, find platforms that integrate Kanban natively to applications that the learner already uses.
For the example above, check out Drag that integrates their Kanban lists to GMail. Everyone uses GMail and it is easier to onboard your learners to a platform that they are already used to.
Planning your lessons
Employee onboarding sessions are typically based on a lesson plan that helps the trainer keep their training materials organized.
The lesson plans for a zero touch training session needs to be different from a regular training module. In a typical setup, the learner starts with a broad overview of the industry and from here, the lessons delve into tasks specific to the learner’s job profile.
This can bring down engagement in a zero touch module. A better way to go about this is by providing context to each of the tasks they are expected to do, a visual or practical way to train them to execute these tasks.
The industry overview can be introduced towards the end once the learner is sufficiently equipped to deal with their tasks.
The lesson plan must also account for the learner’s persona – the formats they are comfortable with, the number of hours they can spend on training and other aspects mentioned earlier in this article.
Finally, make use of internal analytics and reporting tools to study the performance of your learners. Are your learners finding the content and the format useful? If you have previously been training employees using traditional channels, how does zero touch training compare to that?
This establishes a continuous feedback loop that will go someway in building an effective training process for your new hires.
