Greetings from the stay-at-home mandate. This unpredictable time has been very challenging for everyone. People are struggling to balance new work and home life norms as children attend school online and adults work remotely. Many are expected to work from home as if it’s second nature while others may have had to close their business’s doors or suffer the loss of a job. Strength can be found in the chaos by focusing on the ways people are staying engaged in their community and supporting those in need.

How to Leverage Your Existing LMS:

Many businesses are negatively affected by the coronavirus, often in business closures or social distancing mandates. While we, too, have been affected, we are thankful for the ability to help many of our clients. We have our top tips for businesses laid out below. We hope to get more dialogue and encourage comments about what has worked for you.

Let’s start with businesses that have trainers on staff that typically train face-to-face, in person. These are often salaried employees who are on the road training in person and now are in their offices or at home. The examples listed below assume you have a Learning Management System (LMS) if not LearningZen then something else. 

Face-to-Face Trainers

• Review your training materials, revise and improve your digital assets.
• Record yourself doing your in-person training lessons. You can do this with a phone camera and phone camera tripod holder ($15 on amazon).
• Build online training courses for your in-person courses.
• Ask for someone on your team or even the Learningzen team to review your materials.
• Build Quizzes, games, infographics and other fun material for your online courses.
• Roll out company policies on things like COVID-19 that are evolving.
• Those ideas you’ve been thinking about implementing but just can never find the time to focus on. Now is a great time to knock some of these tasks off.

Service-Based Businesses with Layoffs

• Will former employees be there when you are ready to rehire or will they have gotten a new job? If they won’t be back then you will need to be training from scratch for that role prior to being fully operational. 
• Do you have new curbside and delivery processes everyone needs to know about? Document these as an exam only course by pasting your policy into a single exam question then, ask the course takers to attest that they’ve read, reviewed and agree to your new policies. 
• Did you lease subject matter expertise during your layoffs? How do we disseminate to our new staff?
• When your staff does return what did they forget? Should we remind them of key points about their job/role? The longer this goes the harder it will be to remember everything they were doing. 
• If training were 100% optional for hourly staff while they were out but might be an investment in themselves, could they take training at their leisure (non-mandatory training)?
• Current training on processes that have changed? For instance, are you doing delivery and roadside pickup now?
• We are all going to have less time to onboard and train when things shift back to all hands on deck. Making online courses means you are always there for anyone and everyone that wants to learn more about the business and the different roles and responsibilities. 
• Stay engaged with former staff if you want them back.
• Are there some soft skill courses that would help folks at home?

Seasonal Businesses

• Review the materials you have, update things that need to be updated
• Time investments now should lead to monetary rewards in the future
• Better trained staff put out a better product
• Online onboarding with your LMS
• Instead of teaching in-person, start recording your sessions, a mobile phone should work well. 
• Leverage material provided by your associations
• Ask your staff to build some of the courses for you, break things down to small bits that a single employee could disseminate. Don’t think about all of your guest services training as one course, start with one person building the proper way to greet a customer. Then workflow out what happens next in the customer journey.

Businesses Adjusting to Remote Employees

• Do they understand your Work From Home policy, do you have one? Is it shared with your staff?
• This is a good time to be sharpening the saws, more training upfront means a better response when things start going back to normal-ish. 
• Are your trainers also grounded? Have them working on online training content or refreshing and revising the future in-person content. 
• Are you updating the people that are working from home? In times like this,  people don’t need to be managed they need to be led. Are you a leader or a manager?
• You are saving money on flights and travel right now, putting this back into your training materials should really help when things come back, they will come back. 
• How can you help those around you more affected?
• When your staff sees you investing in training now they believe there is a future because you believe there is one or why else would you be investing in your training?
• Address soft skills that would help your staff long term

Looking out for family, friends and your community is the number one priority right now, being strategic with your business decisions is also important. Can you leverage this time for the betterment of all through re-designed training programs and improved customer care training? We believe an upfront investment today should lead to greater financial returns in the future. 

Please be safe and let us know if we can help, this is our passion and we are all in this together.

Sincerely,

Douglas Mark

President

LearningZen.com