How to Approach Remote Professional Development (That Isn’t Boring)
As a leader, you know how important ongoing professional development is for your team.
At NEWaukee, we take our company culture very seriously – especially now that we’re a remote-first team. To prioritize our team’s personal growth, we created an internal training program that we call “Club Peak”.
Training should never feel like another task on an already long to-do list. We designed Club Peak to be both live and asynchronous, meaning that our busy and dispersed team can participate in real-time sessions or at their own pace to learn, grow, and inspire one another.
So far, we’ve hosted sessions on a variety of topics – featuring internal leaders as well as outside experts like Steven Van Cohen, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Connectable.
Topics have included:
Curiosity as a Way of Life
How to Turn Anxiety into a Superpower
Motion: How to Work Faster, Not Harder
And if our team can’t make it to the live sessions, we record them so they don’t miss out.
As part of Club Peak, we also offer space and time for wellness activities like meditation or hiking, prompts to form healthy habits, and reflection questions to develop greater self-awareness.
We encourage our team to put calendar holds on their schedules to set aside time to prioritize their own development in this way. Team members also get involved in the process by tracking their Club Peak progress in a shared leaderboard, so they can see what activities they’ve completed.
A new, unique aspect we have added to our Club Peak program is the opportunity for team members to earn badges by participating in certain programs (think less boring LinkedIn Badges, more goofy Girl Scout patches).
Some of the badges include:
Survivalist Badge: For stepping outside your comfort zone and not only surviving, but thriving!
Curses & Hexes Badge: For skills improvement that helped prevent something lousy from happening.
Espionage Badge: For presenting research on outside best practices that the company can use to improve.
Other badges up for grabs reward improving mental or physical wellness, participating in a book club, and more. They’re a fun and very-NEWaukee way for team members to track their progress and see their growth and achievements recognized.
We know that investing in professional development can sometimes feel like an extra, an add-on, another thing to do on top of an already-busy schedule. But it’s an essential part of team culture building, especially for remote and hybrid teams.
Club Peak is our way of providing that development in a way that feels natural and actually beneficial, rather than just more work.
Interested in learning more about how NEWaukee approaches remote and hybrid culture building? Give us a shout!