6 Ways to Build an Enduring Learning Culture for the Remote Workforce

A Gartner survey shows that 48% of employees will prefer working remotely, at least part of the time, even after the pandemic. To make remote working smoother, it is important to communicate effectively, adopt continuous learning, and foster a company-wide learning culture.

Businesses can pivot on technology to build a learning culture that:

• makes skilling and development opportunities equally accessible to all employees
• increases knowledge sharing between leaders and employees to improve performance
• helps manage change with agility
• encourages free communication and discussion to cultivate a shared sense of purpose
• enables more talent to become a part of the digital economy with greater ease

To build a remote workforce for the future, focus on developing critical skills that help businesses gain a competitive edge. Technology can help create digital spaces where everyone in an organisation can access learning and support to maximise their potential.

Here's how technology can help you build a strong digital learning culture:

1. Create tailor-made content

The one-size-fits-all approach to learning doesn't work anymore. Knowledge should be dynamic to supplement the roles and responsibilities of each department and individual. Create branded, custom learning experiences with a solution that allows you to:

• Base knowledge on actual roles and processes specific to your organisation
• Train employees to solve real business challenges
• Bring out your brand's values and culture
• Tie learning to measurable metrics and business goals

2. Make learning accessible

Making time to upskill oneself becomes difficult at times, given the day-to-day demands of a job. And here's where learning on a cloud-based platform can help employees to:

• Have the flexibility and convenience to learn at their own pace
• Access knowledge from anywhere, even their smartphones
• Proactively seek knowledge

3. Gamify learning

Learning is not limited to lengthy workshops and hyper-technical books anymore. Even the most complex of concepts can be broken down into visually appealing and engaging formats. Gamification can transform learning by:

• Making learning fun and easy to increase engagement
• Making it easier to impart practical knowledge and training
• Enabling healthy competition that helps employees stay motivated and achieve defined targets

4. Make learning measurable

Allowing employees to track their learning helps them get a better sense of their progress. This also makes it easier for them to go back and focus on the things that need improvement to increase knowledge retention.

Use a digital learning platform that allows you to:

• Engage employees with short, interactive quizzes to test their knowledge
• Track employees' learning journeys and reward those that demonstrate new skills
• Award achievements with points, badges, and ranks

With access to these reports and learning trajectories, leaders can give their team members more targeted, constructive feedback to accelerate growth. This also gives employees the opportunity to interact and learn from their seniors in a more productive and transparent way. Such interactions can even induce a sense of connectedness and belonging among remote workers.

5. Incentivise learning

Measurable learning can also be translated into justifiable rewards - in terms of advancements at work or monetary incentives. As employees demonstrate higher levels of learning, they can be:

• entrusted with more complex tasks
• Appraised and promoted through transparent, evidence-based processes

6. Drive continual learning

Learning has to be continuous in an environment that is always in flux. Static knowledge goes stale fast and cannot support the upskilling needed to navigate such change.

As success today is a moving target, technology will enable you to:

• Make learning digital and dynamic to change
• Easily create more learning modules based on new requirements
• Enhance everyday work by integrating learning into tools that employees use daily
• Surface relevant learning with recommendations and notifications

Creating a digital repository of knowledge can democratise learning and even become a central touchpoint where on-site and off-site employees come together over shared goals - like improving performance and sharing ideas.

Salesforce myTrailhead is a learning experience platform that enables businesses to upskill their organisation from anywhere, fast. It is cloud-based and customisable, meaning businesses can create custom learning journeys for anyone in their organisation. It is perfect for organisations that want to create resilient digital learning cultures that increase efficiency and promote growth. All of this is made possible as myTrailhead gives you the options to create learning modules:

• with prebuilt templates or custom content
• with gamification to make upskilling fun and easy
• that make it easy to track progress