Work-From-Home Tips for Instructional Designers or eLearning Professionals

The global workforce was slowly transitioning to adopt daily-work ideas, such as adopting work-from-home for most employees or the idea of having a 4-day work week. However, the slow transition got transformed into an overnight push due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

As a result, enterprises and leaders are realizing the long-term benefits, such as cost savings, reduced travel time, and a better work-life balance that the work-from-home model has to offer. Hence, the work-from-home model is here to stay for the long haul.

To ensure that you are successful as a professional when working from home, you need to follow certain best practices and tips. You will find plenty of blogs and posts that share such general tips, but as course developers (Instructional Designer), our team dynamics and work is a niche. Hence, we’ve compiled some tips that will enable you to succeed working from home as a course developer (Instructional Designer). So, here they are:

  • Work as if you are in office to keep the focus. If you are distractible, get ready for work every morning like you are going to physically go into work.
  • Set expectations with family that although you are home, you are still doing official work, so they understand your limited availability and delayed responses.
  • Send a ‘work-from-home email‘ to your team to share with them your schedule and task list for the day. This will keep your team informed about your personal breaks, such as lunchtime, coffee breaks, or grocery shopping. This way, your peers and managers will know the times of the day when you will not be responsive or away from your desk. If your team has a shared calendar, please update your schedule in the shared calendar.
  • Be prepared for power cuts and outages. In some geographies, due to weather or any other technical challenges, there may be power outages. So, to ensure you have the time to backup and delegate work files to someone else on the team,  always keep laptop on charging, so you have a few minutes to take a backup, save work, and communicate any possible delays to your client or team. In addition, if someone from your team can pickup the work, having your laptop’s backup charge will enable you to pass the work to them.
  • Communicate to collaborate. Stay connected with your team using any preferred collaboration tool, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, etc. In addition, do not hesitate to schedule and hop on a video call. Video-enabled web meetings can help to alleviate some issues related to remote working as they can support some personalized communication.

  • Manage communication with your Graphics team with details and clear instructions. As course developers, some of us do not know or have the license to make and edit graphics in tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, etc. Hence, we may need to collaborate with multimedia and design experts who can make graphics to ensure our courses, not only have good content, but also looks good with engaging presentation. Hence, give clear instructions to graphic designers, if possible, give mockups or references from the Internet, which they can use to finalize your course designs as per your preferences.

  • Manage communication with your manager responsibly. That is, communicate only what’s needed proactively, and with the right amount of information. It is likely that your manager or lead will be working with multiple team members, responding to various queries from the organization’s leadership, and responding to customers. Hence, due to such multi-tasking, their time and attention is a rare commodity. So, clear and effective communication with your managers will save their time, and build your reputation as a responsible profession and communicator.

We hope these tips help you to succeed.