I just moved into a new role at EMC. I’m now the Community Manager for our internal Career Community for our services group.
In plain English, that means that I’m responsible for creating a community kind of like this one, but with a focus on career development for our service folks. It’s a place to find career and development resources, connect with other people, and share ideas.
Kind of cool, right? EMC has a fantastic internal social network, EMC|One, that we can use for everything from collaborative team projects to entire social communities built around work groups, locations or functions.
With this new role, I get to put the skills I’ve developed in creating and growing Renegade HR to use inside my organization. Exciting stuff!
So, how do you train and develop remote employees?
How do you train and develop remote employees?
The Career Community is intended for a global organization. The people are supported are scattered throughout the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
Many aren’t in offices. They work remotely out in the field. Doesn’t make career development easy.
Do you have any tips, best practices or ideas on training and developing remote employees? I’d love to hear them!
How do you provide interesting and useful training? How do people network and advance their careers? What does remote mentoring look like?
Let’s get a discussion going!
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Hey Chris,
Yeah EMC does have an awesome network. Joel’s dad was telling me how someone found a bone marrow match via the EMC global network!
With regards to training and developing remote employees, its important to find out how people want to learn and talk about their personal development- and use a variety of medium to do it.
Get creative and see what your people come up with- don’t force everything online if the applications are slow or frustrating or if it is not what people want.
A lot of it for me is about the interaction with others. I studied a Masters online via distance at UTS and thought it was great.
Best of luck!
Jess
Jess, thanks for the insights! Were you able to get interaction from an online Master’s program? If so, how?
To be honest it was a few years ago and in hindsight was a bit clunky. There were online forums where people started threads etc, but these days with all the social media tools available it could be amazing what could be achieved- particularly as I was studying with people all across the world- and I only found that out because we introduced ourselves online :)
*interwebs magic*
Chris,
Our small consulting firm has 5 regional offices and there are incentives to contribute to a collaborative culture. One tool we use is a forum accessible by all where people can start threads that are organized in different areas (i.e. Project Management, Business Intelligence, Non-Business, etc). People can sign up for e-mail notifications for all or some of the groups.
It’s been an effective tool for idea sharing and thought leadership discussions to share intellectual capital across offices without being co-located.
Jason Davis
@Jason – Thanks for the info! Have you found that people were quick to start using the forums, or did you need to create incentives to get people to go there?
EMC has something similar. It’s quite popular with certain pockets of people, and not as much with others. I’m hoping to figure out a few ways to get everyone more involved.
Chris,
People will only use the forums for one of two reasons: 1) the company incentivizes them to contribute or 2) they find real value in the exchange on the board.
I’d like to think we do both. Because of (1), a poster will get a very active discussion going quickly on the board, which often allows them to find the solution/template/code, etc. that they need to deliver to a client.
With regard to incentive, we have a semi-annual consultant review process. One (of 12) areas covers “Intellectual Capital Contributions”. Consultants are rated on a likert scale ranging from N/A to 4 and cumulative points help the organization determine promotion as well as play into comp incentives like equity, management compensation, and profit sharing.
Hope this helps.
BTW – still want to reply to your e-mail, just been a crazy week/weekend. We will catch up this week.
Jason
@Jason, thanks for the insight!