Embracing New Tech: How To Help And Train Your Employees

Is your company on the verge of firing valued employees who can't adapt to fast changes ushered by new technology? Do you have new hires who need to be trained fast on the conduct of operations but are overwhelmed by it all? If retention and low KPIs are critical issues, proper onboarding and upskilling training can help employees face their nemesis and get back on track. 

The impact of human capital in an organisation is felt most when a well-trained workforce, equipped with the right skills and mindset, cohesively works together to achieve business goals. With hybrid workplaces fast becoming the norm, HR is now tasked with hiring locally, outsourcing globally, and on to meet operational demands. All these are on top of coping with attrition and creating a positive work culture.

Challenges In and Out of the Workplace

The Internet revolutionised how companies develop, conduct, and market their business – making it more efficient and competitive than it had ever been, but only if employees can leverage this technology effectively. The COVID-19 pandemic experience further highlighted challenges and forced companies to adapt to dependence on technology or die. However, even when you do something online like hiring dedicated react native developers, you still need to help them to adapt to the new team offline too.

Read more: How Technology Is Transforming Business

Technology is a paradox – both a friend and foe. While it poses a divide between challenged and competent people, it is also an efficient, cost-efficient, and scalable way to train and assess employees on time, whether working synchronously or asynchronously in in-house, hybrid or fully remote settings.  

When and Why Should You Outsource? 

Is your company ripe for outsourcing training and other services? Companies want to make money, so focusing on core processes is primary, and anything else distracts from that goal. Do you want to allocate vital financial and human resources to maintain an IT department and a separate Training Department to ensure that employees know how to use the system and its tools? Doing so takes up a huge chunk of capital in comparison to ROI.  

What are managed IT services, and could they help? The practice of outsourcing time-consuming IT needs including processes and server maintenance, to a trusted company is what managed IT services mean in a nutshell. Managed IT services free your employees of technology pain points and empowers them to shine where they are experts.

Supplementary reading: Strategies for Growing Your Business Through Outsourcing

Working with an IT services in Edmonton or managed IT services in Chicago or wherever you may be based also frees your company from IT security worries. The company can focus on its core business by outsourcing its IT services, including the helpful IT Helpdesk. At the same time, the team resolves IT questions and speeds up fixes, providing your employees with valuable assistance. 

Training Needs in the Modern Workplace

Identified training needs differ according to where you are in the organisation. The most common are: 

• Soft skills 
• Communication skills 
• Analytical skills 
• Digital skills 

Digital skills are deemed the most difficult and the area where most training is needed. Digital adoption platform (DAP) software solutions integrated with company tools and processes are popular because the user experience is simplified, and engagement is promoted at a reduced cost to the company.

How Employees Learn 

The common thought is that younger employees are digital natives used to e-learning. In comparison, older employees prefer face-to-face interaction and may resist self-paced, blended, modular, and interactive learning that may or may not be conducted in real-time. Though this may not be true, one fact stands out. How training is carried out pre-pandemic has changed, with most of it done outside the confines of a training room and often completed without ever meeting any instructor in person. 

This may interest you: How Digital Learning Benefits Your Organisation

The change in delivery mode is favoured by companies who need to get onboarded or upskilled employees up-to-speed in the workplace because:  

• Content can be standardised. 
• Content is scalable and can be customised easily (e.g., AI-enabled learning management systems) 
• Retention is better. 
• Delivery is faster. 
• Delivery is more uniform. 
• Comprehension is easily accessed, and mistakes are corrected. 
• It’s simple and cheaper to conduct because a training room and equipment are not necessary, except for blended learning.   
• It’s less laborious since content can be streamed and reused. 
• It can be integrated into the workflow, so no time is wasted on taking time off from work for onboarding, retraining, upskilling, or assessment.

Inhouse: Help Employees to Adapt to New Technology 

Resistance to change is expected – convincing employees to trust, embrace technology, and accept the inevitability of it all is a massive hurdle for employers. Using the tools created for success is hard to force-feed on employees accustomed to how things are done. 

How can companies promote cooperation? 

• Listening to a team member's pain points is essential but is often taken for granted. Sure, the investment in new technology is high, but if companies don't hear out employees who have valid reservations, these tools risk being digital white elephants. Educate the whole organisation on the urgency of the matter and how agility can save the day.  
• Make training relevant to their experience: learning is facilitated when it can be used or applied immediately.   
• Use formats that will engage your type of learner, whether the training is hybrid or remote. Are they readers, viewers, copycats, or experiential learners? Additionally, are you skilled enough to create your materials and use what's available in your organisation, like Google Classroom? 
• Be mindful of how training is timed: don't train way in advance because people forget! 
• Factor in how much time is used in searching the learning app (or apps) for answers versus the trainer giving timely responses.
• Be flexible on rollouts – setting hard deadlines on learning tasks can dim confidence. Some learners need to absorb new information piecemeal, while others are too wary of making mistakes and take more time. Others need to repeat some tasks until the pattern sinks in. 
• When training employees for new technology, be the subject matter expert! 

Online courses that aren’t customised may not be appropriate for every learner because individuals learn differently. Questions posed aren't readily answered when there is no mentoring.

Explore here: Learning Through Collaboration: Social E-Learning

On-the-job training has aspects that can't be taught when you never step inside the office. For example, company culture is best imbibed through osmosis; no matter how well-written, modules can't replace that.

Conclusion

A workforce using various technologies that make them more productive and confident is desirable, but this is not always the case. No matter how HR hires based on good fit, the spectrum of skills, knowledge, aptitude, cultural background, and "learnability" has spread. Thus, the pressure to equip employees with the skillsets to work well in teams, meet KPI, and achieve company goals.

Outsourcing managed IT services removes the difficulty of creating an IT team along and training a workforce. It helps the company to focus on its core business and lessens the learning curve of employees who have to embrace new technology.

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