Do you want to be more efficient at work, even when working from home? Want the admiration of your team or manager, even if they all work from home?

With more and more companies adopting the remote working policy, employees must learn new skills to adapt to new circumstances. Here are some free courses that can prepare you for the challenges ahead and improve your performance.

1. daring: Manage remote teams with Upwork

Managing a team remotely is not easy. Managers need to put extra effort into administering a distributed team. If this is your first time managing a remote team, you should want to take this free online course from Udacity.

By taking this course, you will learn how to adopt personalized strategies for your team. It will also help you learn how to use essential tools. You will be able to create a culture that supports remote working by taking this course.

It will also educate you on remote team management best practices. Whether you have a remote team or want to build the workforce up front, this course will ensure your business achieves the best results.

2. edX: Remote working revolution for everyone

As the name of this course suggests, it prepares everyone to stay fully in tune with the new revolutionary circumstances of remote working. This self-paced edX course helps you increase productivity and build trust among team members.

You can develop knowledge about the key elements of remote working and use them to successfully develop strategies for your team from this course. It also focuses on improving the productivity of a remote team through improved communication and collaboration.

A distributed team should use different tools for task management and communication. The course will help you choose the right tools. By learning to gain the trust of your colleagues, this course will help you become an effective leader.

3. Udemy: Good practices for working remotely

Many remote workers find it difficult to do their best from home because their home may not provide the best environment for focused work. If you want to be successful while working remotely, take this Udemy course to learn work from home best practices.

The main objective of this course is to help you create a distraction-free space in your home for office work so that you can stay productive. It also trains you to stay socially connected with your teammates for effective communication.

Related: How to Overcome Distractions in the Workplace and Get Back to Work

In addition, you will know which tools to use to ensure the accountability of each member of the team. It also helps you manage your time so that you can deliver maximum productivity.

It is not easy for a team leader to manage a team that has recently moved to a remote location. Everyone has moved to a different location and now faces a different environment that you ignore. This Skillshare course can provide you with training in the fundamentals of operating a remote team.

It focuses on the people, processes and tools to create a strong remote working environment. You will learn which examples and suggestions are best suited for your team and begin to manage them effectively. In addition, the course will be useful for hybrid working models.

5. LinkedIn Learning: Working from home: strategies for success

Maintaining work-life balance while working remotely becomes the biggest challenge for many. Taking this LinkedIn Learning course will give you the right guidelines for working from home successfully. You can learn to stay focused and productive during office hours through this course.

It will also contain practical advice on maintaining sanity and reconciling professional and private life. You will also learn how to transition smoothly to remote work and how to communicate professionally with team members.

Related: How To Balance Freelance Work With Your Full-Time Job: Tips

The course will also offer advice on task planning, collaboration, online communication, setting realistic expectations and goals, maximizing success and preventing burnout.

This course teaches you how to use Google Apps, Trello, and Zoom. These are popular apps that remote teams can use for task management, productivity, file sharing, and communication.

The Alison course module teaches you how to use Google Apps, with an additional emphasis on Google Drive. From this course, you will also learn how to communicate using Zoom and manage tasks and projects with Trello.

It will also present a comparison between Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel which you can use to identify the most suitable tool for your needs.

seven. Microsoft Learn: Work remotely with Microsoft 365

If your organization relies on Microsoft 365 for workflow and communication, you need this Microsoft Learn course to be good at working remotely. The Curse allows you to use Microsoft 365 tools from remote locations without any difficulty.

This basic training module focuses on critical remote work applications such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Office.com. From there, you’ll know the best practices for communicating through Teams, syncing files between cloud and on-premises versions.

Also, it will teach you how to connect to a computer or an organizational network from a remote location.

You can opt for this self-paced course from Perdue University Global to train you in remote work. It is designed to give you the knowledge and resources to work remotely. Employees, team leaders and managers can all benefit.

Communication strategies, remote working tools are some of the key points on which the course focuses. It also provides you with useful resources for remote working.

In addition, the course also addresses legal issues, professionalism and the psychological impact of remote working. It also tells you about the best practices people should adopt when working from home.

Improve skills to become an effective remote worker

Besides the added stress and distraction, a remote worker faces many other challenges. They must adapt to changing work flow and methods of interaction. The free online courses described above will help remote employees excel in their respective roles.

While working remotely can be difficult, it is not impossible to be successful working from home. You can expect promotion and pay rise by demonstrating maximum productivity while working remotely.

Read more

About the Author