Remote Leaders: Ignore L&D at Your Own Risk!

Training doesn’t just work simply by making employees more efficient; it boosts morale, builds foundational knowledge and discourages turnover. (But you know this already from reading our latest email. If you missed it, though, here’s a link to sign up!)

Good deal. But what about those companies that don’t offer learning and development options for employees? Do they get by unscathed, somehow?

Sadly, no. That scenario comes with its own set of repercussions:

• No succession plan. It would be great to know who could step in to fill the big shoes left by an outgoing member of your leadership team, wouldn’t it? Without providing the right training, you’ll have a harder time identifying who could step up and truly be ready on day 1.
• Talent loss. Tell me your star employee just gave her official two weeks, and I’ll read your mind: ‘Uhhh...can we somehow download the contents of her brain?’ Knowledge management crises aside, if only she’d felt there was reason to stick around, she might’ve been your next COO.
• Longer runways to competency. Your team may still hit the desired professional milestones without focused professional development; it just might take them several months (or a year) longer than desired. But what’s a few thousand hours of billable time?
• Hidden skills gaps. When training is front and center, it’s harder to hide weaknesses or gaps in one’s skillset. Without it, you may only uncover what your team is missing when it’s too late. (Checkout our 2 part series on interests, knowledge, and skills in our upcoming Networkplaceless events.)

Ouch. All of that was hard to type, much less read and well, voluntarily accept. What company leader really wants to deal with those issues? Probably very few choose this route. In reality, there are upfront problems they must first confront in order to get a learning and development program off the ground.

The biggest obstacles to starting a training initiative within distributed or hybrid organizations involve this trifecta:

That’s right: if you don’t get your ‘ABB’ in shape, you won’t be launching internal training programs anytime soon. Thankfully, there’s not a lot of crunching involved to make that happen--unless we’re talking numbers.

Calculating your potential training ROI includes the considerable savings you’ll enjoy from retaining increasingly skilled teammates rather than having to recruit and undergo a costly hiring process that could take up to six months or longer. If you’re wondering where to start, we’ve put together a handy Learning and Development planning guide to get you from point A (as in alignment) to point B (budget, of course).

Tell us about your experience.

We’ve done enough of the talking! Please take this incredibly brief survey to let us know what’s helped you to secure buy-in, and which obstacles you faced when considering and/or implementing remote training. This questionnaire is designed for remote workers of all stripes, so don’t count yourself out if you’re not in charge of HR, for example.

Did we mention your feedback on this is critical? We’ll be generating an in-depth research report on learning and development in remote environments, but we can’t do it without you! Determining which questions reflect today’s hot-button issues for both HR pros and individual remote workers will make all the difference.

If you need guided support in building your remote leadership & development plan, we'd love to chat.