The first day at a large organization can be an anxious day even for seasoned professionals when they are forced to work remotely.

From getting to know their team and reporting managers, to becoming aware of the company policies - remote onboarding can be overwhelming.

Delivering onboarding training remotely is a tough challenge.

The obvious solution that comes to mind - online learning.

Once you put the training material online, your newbies can learn anywhere, anytime-on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

But your onboarding training material was created for classroom training.

Your instructors played a major role in engaging new hires and making training more interactive in a classroom setup. How do you make online training more engaging and interactive?

After reading this guide, you will understand:

• How to redefine the goals of remote training for new hires.
• Mapping your existing training content to training goals.
• How to create and deploy your new hire training program quickly.

Step 1 - Define the goals of remote new hire training

Onboarding new hires remotely brings new challenges. These challenges demand a re-look at the goals of your new hire training.

A good way to understand the goals of online training is to start with an understanding of what's working well with your current program-and what's not.

Identifying the gap between where you are today and where you need to be will help you focus on the most critical training goals.

Start by looking at some key data points around employee job satisfaction and retention, and then solicit perspectives from people managers and newly hired employees.

It may seem simple, but just asking a few questions can help deepen your understanding. For example, you can start with questions like:

• What's working well with how people are onboarded today?
• What's not working well?
• What do you wish you'd known when you first started working here?

If not, the training material needs to be updated with appropriate modules.

Defining clear goals would also help you determine the focus areas of the training.

Let's look at an example of new hire training goals at a contact center. By the third week, the contact center would want its new hires to:

1. feel welcomed and a part of the company.
2. is well-versed with the company's communication standards.
3. understand how to resolve the top 20 issues that crop up frequently.
4. know how to operate the CRM efficiently to minimize mistakes.
5. understand key metrics that they need to uphold.
6. understand performance expectations for the next 3 to 6 months.
7. understand the growth possibilities based on performance.

And that the entire training should complete in 12 days, as opposed to 20 days that it currently takes.

Well defined goals make training content creation more focused. By using your existing training material to meet some of these goals, you will save a ton of time in taking your onboarding training online.

Step 2 - Map your onboarding training content to training goals

Your refreshed goals determine if your existing content maps well to the training goals and what new content you would need.

Going online will not magically improve the training for you.

You have to produce top quality content aligned to your training goal to make your training program successful.

The next step will be to define the structure of your training program starting with the sequence of learning, frequency of assessments.

You would need to decide which parts can be completely online and which ones would still need an instructor, which modules need deeper focus and which ones need to be light.

This would help you choose the right existing content to repurpose and arrive at topics that need new content.

How to decide what part of the training should be completely online and what should be instructor-led?

Let's look at what works for self-learning mode.

Company policies and procedures explained via real life scenarios are topics that are ideal for self-paced learning.

With topics such as workplace harassment or data integrity - employees doze off to cookie cutter, theoretical explanations for such training programs. These training programs need to be interactive for self-paced learning.

Here's what you can do.

You can use stock or real images, create a scenario and walk your new hires through training objectives, goals, challenges and ideal actions.

Company introduction videos can be moved to self-learning mode as well.

Adding interactivity to existing content is a challenge.

Here are three examples on how you can mimic classroom like interactions:

1. For company introduction - Click images of your office and create a virtual office tour. Use clickable buttons on images to explain parts of your office. You may also add audio or video elements as well.
2. For explanatory topics like company policies - Ensure that learners don't have to sit through long videos or reading modules. Add questions in-between (every 2-3 minutes) to retain attention and help learners understand the topics better.
3. For functional training related to the learner's role - Create videos or simulations for software or workflow related training. New generation of workers are comfortable with learning complex concepts via YouTube. Cash in on this and make video or simulated workflows to explain complex operational concepts.

Reserve the instructor-led sessions to the following.

• have short, regular scheduled sessions where the new hires can raise doubts and ask questions about what they have done. When you find certain questions coming in frequently, you can update the content to already cover it.
• topics that require role-plays.
• topics that require in-person demonstration (try moving some of these to recorded videos if possible).

A quick note - your online training program should not overwhelm your new hires with too much information.

Avoid oversharing by dividing your onboarding training content into need-to-know and nice-to-know sections.

Your training efforts should focus on the need-to-know information since it's the most critical content for meeting your training goals.

The nice-to-know information can be removed entirely in some cases - saving a lot of time in creating content.

Or, you can include a link to the nice-to-know information, so it's still available to learners.

Step 3 - Time to create and deploy your online training

Now that you have defined your new hire training goals and defined your structure, the next step is to create online training content (assuming that you already have the content for the instructor-led sessions).

There are two ways to go about creating content.

The old way - handover the structure and the current training content to a training creation vendor and wait for content to be created.

Vendors use multiple authoring apps to create interactive training content and they take weeks or sometimes months to deliver.

Multiple review cycles add to the time.

In this approach, you convert only the static content to online self-learning, severely limiting the amount of training that should be moved online.

You would still be stuck with having to schedule a lot of instructor led sessions in this case. By following this method, you can expect your overall training effort to increase.

Once your training content is ready, there is further delay as your administrators take time to upload the content to your Learning Management System (LMS).

This leads us to the second way of creating your onboarding training content.

The new way - The older way of creating training content is restrictive and inefficient.

Restrictive - in terms of how much content you can take online, and

Inefficient - because of the time and effort involved.

You would want your training team to accomplish the following independently:

• Transition existing training material to suit online training
• Add interactive and engaging elements to your existing training
• Create new training content quickly
• Deploy training and monitor learner progress in real-time
• Identify new hires who get stuck in training

Your team needs a simple tool to create online training so that you can get it into the hands of learners faster.

The tool should enable a single person or a small team to use easily customizable interactions, scenarios, and sorting activities - to turn existing content into interactive, enjoyable self-learning content within hours.

That's why we created Nittio Learn. A tool that is easier to use than Microsoft PowerPoint - and your people don't need special skills or technical expertise to churn out interactive, engaging training content in just a few hours.

There's no separate system to mess with, and you don't need to wait on an LMS administrator to upload your course.

Just publish your course with a few clicks on an enterprise secure system, and enroll your new employees for onboarding training from any device or location.

You can also monitor how new employees are faring with their training. Nittio Learn includes reporting that gives you and your people managers insight into new hires' training progress.

Granular reports tell you if your new hires are struggling or getting stuck at a specific topic within your onboarding course.

You can use these insights to create targeted and personalized mini-modules and ensure smooth onboarding.

Let's recap

eLearning is a natural fit for remote onboarding training.

And it shouldn't take a lot of time or effort - to translate what you're already doing in the classroom to an online course.

This is why you need an eLearning system that empowers you to produce creative training experiences for your employees, quickly and effortlessly.

Nittio Learn can be a perfect match for an organization with small training teams tasked with running a large number of training programs regularly.

Visit nittiolearn.com to understand the scope and use case for your organization.