Covid-19 . This one word is enough to instill a lot of distress among us. Our life as we knew it, changed a lot of direction. We endured the global pandemic and came up with a lifestyle that we never thought was possible.
However, in this topsy-turvy situation, one thing remained constant – education.
Our thirst for knowledge and will to learn never stopped.
With classroom learning now a distant dream, e-learning has paved its way into our lives. This online mode of learning has proven quite advantageous. From primary education to graduation to corporate training, e-learning has opened its doors to the masses.
Why do you need corporate e-learning during Covid-19?
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 as global health emergency in the early 2020, resulting in the closure of educational institutions to corporate and business offices. As the global pandemic is keeping us restricted to our homes, ‘Work from Home’ or remote working has become the new normal.
It may seem fun at first, to let go of the travel times, strict working hours, and other hustle bustle. However, with the situation becoming more permanent, a major issue slowly tiptoed in our lives – BURNOUT.
With the sudden shift to Work from home, the employees are left with juggling multiple responsibilities. While the boundary between professional and personal time started to fade, stress and frustration among employees started to emerge.
It may seem like a common personal problem at the beginning, but if left unnoticed, stress among employees may cause increased error, fatigue, decreased motivation, irritation, frustration, sour mood and long logging hours with less work finished. Result- ‘It is your business that suffers’.
To cope up with this crisis, more and more employers are now investing in employee learning and training. As physical classes are taking a backseat, online education or e-learning has become the new found love, especially for the working class people, as they aspire to keep themselves relevant to the industry.
It is no secret that e-learning can open doors to a wide number of employee trainings that can enhance their knowledge and expertise. It helps them to pick up new skills and hone the existing ones.
Advantages of corporate digital learning during Covid-19
For companies, that are not yet familiar with e-learning, this is a good time to introduce online learning to your employees.
With a rapid and adaptive approach, digital learning, online training and virtual communication can be successfully implemented throughout the workforce, even from home. On the other hand, companies that have already incorporated e-learning and training have a better chance of experimenting and developing various methods and courses with a creative approach and new online strategies.
This helps in providing psychosocial support and in turn boosts the morale of your employees. These initiatives can also help bridge the knowledge gap of conventional employees who are not yet accustomed with e-learning and contemporary workers who have already familiarized themselves with the progress of digital learning.
Now that your employees are working from home, it is a good time to take a step back and know their company. You can use online learning platform to help your workforce revisit your organization’s ideals and ethics.
This helps to reignite the organizational culture and values among your employees. Customized and curated interactive courses on your company’s policies, work culture, org structure etc. are great way to help onboard new workers.
With the help of digital learning, and a well-planned e-learning platform, Learning and Development can be accessed efficiently, maintaining the productivity and supporting the new norms of social and physical distancing.
How e-learning can help with employee engagement during Covid-19
As more and more companies are adapting to remote working or work from home policies, the workforce completely relies on online courses and corporate trainings for their learning and development.
Accessibility, affordability, flexibility, learning pedagogy and life-long learning are some of the terms associated with the e-learning. It is an open fact that online leaning is easily accessible to anyone, even to the workforce that is remote.
E-learning comes at a comparatively cheaper cost as compared to the physical setup you need for classroom learning and conducting special seminars and trainings.
Flexibility is also a major advantage when it comes to digital learning as the learner can plan and schedule their learning hours as per their convenience, and without affecting their designated work hours. Online learning gives your employees an experience of blended-learning, by combining face-to-face lectures and technology.
This type of learning helps learners to take classes from anywhere, anytime and thus retaining the learning capacity and developing new skills.
The modes of online learning has also transformed over the years. Gone are the days when you just had lengthy readable online books with pages after pages of text.
Digital learning has now transformed into much more interactive and adaptive process, as the courses are shorter, crispier, and more focused towards the learners’ requirement. Also, the dynamic nature of the courses makes it possible to access it from any device of your choice.
This is an important aspect of online learning, as on-growing businesses means your workforce should have a good knowledge of the new techniques and tools that the job demands. The most common and effective way is to go for Bespoke courses. With customized, ready to deploy learning courses and bite size content, your employees can acquire the necessary training at ease.
The adaptive nature of the Bespoke content helps ensure that your workforce is kept updated as per your industry standards. The courses are designed in a way to provide a directed knowledge, rather than a wide range of irrelevant information.
Not only learning, communications method have also transformed with the avid use of technology. The physical face-to-face meetings are now transformed into virtual face-to-face ones.
For instance, you can still conduct your regular weekly meeting through a virtual conference through PC and mobile devices. Online Communication platforms such as MS Teams, Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and many others are coming up with new and enhanced features to make your virtual meet a successful one.
Digital learning also shapes how you store your data and the security measures taken to keep your data safe. Data is stored mostly through cloud storage such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox and other personal devices. However, if your organization follows a confidential data management system, then storing data in this method might increase the risk factor. In such a scenario, you can opt for technology such as intranet, multi-factor authentication, and secure internal drives.
Despite all the ‘ifs and buts’ that may arise, Digital or Online learning is a far better way of keeping your workforce engaged, updated and innovated.
E-Learning can also ignite the creative spark among your workforce and bring out interesting approaches to work culture such as online collaborations, out-of-the-box thinking, virtual events, webinars and lot more. The lack of physical presence in the classrooms is no more the roadblock in the way of learning and development.
In this era of ‘New normal’, learning is all about adapting. With unlimited digital learning scopes, you might just find out the panacea that can help your company maintain a healthy, motivated and productive workforce, even in the hours of global cataclysm.
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