The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to find new, socially-distanced ways of doing familiar things. However, even in switching your employees wholesale to home-based working, you could have overlooked the potential for training them remotely, too – and doing so post-pandemic.
In research mentioned by Information Age, 70% of trainers said they deemed webinars at least as effective as self-paced training, while 57% attached high value to using webinars for training new employees. Here are several compelling reasons why it could work well for your business…
Webinars are relatively inexpensive to run
Traditionally, training new recruits has been seen as a hefty but inescapable expense. Thankfully, though, holding webinars instead of in-person training sessions could at least help you to trim the financial outlay – as you wouldn’t need to spend on food, beverages or handouts for the event.
While you would still need to pay the participants due to the work time they would lose from attending, the cost of running the webinar itself would largely be limited to the cost of the software you use to run it.
Trainees don’t have to sacrifice quite as many work hours
Employee training is an investment of not just your company’s money but also your workers’ time. You are asking your employees to give up a little office time now so that you can help them to maximize their use of it later. Still, they could lose slightly more than a “little” time if they have to travel to and from the venue.
Fortunately, when you deliver the training session as a webinar rather than in person, those employees wouldn’t strictly have to leave their day-to-day workplace simply to participate in the session.
You can easily tailor a webinar to your specific training requirements
Carrying out training via a webinar doesn’t have to mean surrendering too much – if any – of the variety you would otherwise have provided in a face-to-face setting.
You could opt to incorporate not only static PowerPoint slides but also video clips and even snippets of live video in your webinar. There would also be the option of adding polls and online Q&As to your webinar – though you should look for a webinar platform that supports this functionality, like one from ON24.
Webinars are readily accessible – potentially even after they have been delivered
HR Daily Advisor lists what it considers the “greatest benefits” of webinars – including their abilities to “simultaneously train employees in multiple locations” and “provide training in an on-demand format”.
The former could obviously come in useful if your business has grown to the extent that it runs offices in various geographic areas and even different countries – in which case, you might not have to worry too much about time zones…
That’s because, if you just can’t drag certain employees away from their work when you want to train them, you could settle on a compromise where you let them later, when they aren’t rushing to meet a pressing work deadline, access the webinar as a prerecorded program.
