A digital leader's guide to learning on the job

Keep training and upskilling your staff

Just because staff are working from home it doesn’t mean that you can’t or don’t need to ensure that they receive regular training. That’s because training can:

• Support a sense of belonging, particularly when working remotely
• Increase employee skills and productivity
• Improve staff engagement and retention rates

One of the best ways digital leadership can manage and deliver training to remote staff is to use a learning management system (LMS). Learning management systems are delivered as products and services: cloud-based services such as Skillcast and Talent LMS, and products such as iSpring and Moodle which are installed and run in-house.

Improve your remote staff’s time management

As a charity leader you may find that with a remote workforce it harder to keep track of who is working on what, and how long each staff member is devoting to different activities such as those relating directly to service delivery and ones relating to administration supporting service delivery.

You can regain some visibility into what your staff are working on using remote time management software such as Hubstaff or Timedoctor.

Protect data stored in staff members’ homes

Some staff working from home will need to access digital documents and spreadsheets to deliver products and services, and in normal circumstances these would probably be stored and backed up automatically at your charity’s offices.

While working from home then these files should ideally be stored in the cloud where they are easily accessible to all your staff and backed up automatically – Microsoft’s Office 365 makes this easy. But in some circumstances staff working from home may have to store their work on their own computers. That means that if their computer hard drive fails then this work could be lost.

To prevent this, ensure that all remote staff are using backup software such as Google’s Backup and Sync or MSP360 Backup to backup all their work to the cloud automatically.

Rationalise your office space

If you find that a significant proportion of your staff are happy to continue working remotely, and you find that your charity can continue to function well in terms of operations and efficiency, then it may be sensible to continue this type of setup in the longer term, well after any Coronavirus-related lockdowns are relaxed.

This provides a significant opportunity for rent-related cost savings by rationalising your office space and subletting part of it, giving up one or more floors, or even moving to smaller premises.