Every company taking care of its own development and flourishing faces the matter of effective personnel training. Many have understood already that simply providing a tutor to offer a new employee introductory training is not enough and implementing webinars is the best step now. Really good tutors are met seldom; moreover, this method is not suitable for developing key employees is of completely no use. Additionally, constantly active and engaging teaching of employees needs to be taken care of. Training, you would say to this. Sure, one cannot fail to agree. Yet, there is a better variant, which implies the introduction of webinars into a training program.
What Advantages Do Webinars Offer Compare to the Standard Method of Continuous Education?
In the first row, organization and holding of webinars takes much less time and costs. In the second row, webinars are much more convenient: gathering even 1,000 employees there is not a problem anymore, even if they are from different departments and even cities – and all this does not lead to breaking their working process. In the third row, due to their convenience. Moreover, due to their convenience and affordability of learning at webinars, they are much easier to implement into the corporate culture of a company and be sure that education will not get interrupted half-way because of some silly organizational matters.
If you have decided to turn online training into a part of your personnel development program, holding webinars is exactly what you need. When starting, be sure to learn the ten valuable guidelines that would help you to introduce webinars with no worries or mistakes.
Gather a team that will help you to implement online education. Together, you will have to learn all tricky points in holding webinars, master nuances of being a presenter and the ones of webinar platforms. Sure, HR staff will be the best choice for this, as personnel training is a part of their work. Meanwhile, it is very important that all members of your team support implementation of distance education and the very concept of webinars. Flexible people, open to everything new and loving to learn are the best candidates.
You will need people for the roles of a presenter/tutor, designer, manager and copywriter. No doubt, in some cases everything above can be done by a single person, though having some helpers will push things to develop faster.
Get someone from IT personnel to your team to quickly solve technical issues with equipment, ports access and other technical-related matters.
Choose the audience you would like to hold your webinar for. The “for everyone” variant is suitable only for small companies. You can distribute your employees into groups by experience in company, departments, positions. At the very beginning, select a small group for the “pilot run” to polish the skills in such education.
To define the date, you would need to analyze processes and events for a couple of upcoming months and make sure that participation in the webinar and helping to organize it will not distract employees from their business. Moreover, it would be a bad idea to hold a webinar the day before some inspection, important reports and other events, preparation to which will occupy the minds of attendees.
Think of suitable time. In case you decide to hold your webinar during a weekend or out-of-office hours, and participation of all people invited is important, you need to solve the issue with the finance department and HR. According to legislation provisions, employees can undergo training only during working hours, while in case the hours are not paid you will not be able to demand 100% presence.
Having selected the date, do your best to avoid changing it. Let your employees feel that learning is a process in your company as important as wages payment.
Compile a list of possible topics for every group of attendees. If you think that you will be able to cover all matters in a single effort, you will get disappointed. In order to make learning bring real results, you should better devote one webinar to a single topic. Moreover, you can allocate from 40 to 60 minutes to one question. Note that duration, presentation of material and keynote design should be different depending on the target audience of your webinar.
Thus, for ordinary personnel, the average duration of one session should be about 40 minutes, and it should cover one topic with simple presentation and a bright keynote.
Webinars for CEOs can last for over an hour. When covering the material, you should not get into details. Keynote slides should remain laconic and not overloaded with tables and schemes.
For the role of a presenter, you could choose someone from your team, but for this person’s opinion to matter more for others think of inviting guest experts (possibly even from within your company) for a short presentation of 10-15 minutes. Of course, you will have to conduct initial instructing, inspire (persuade) everyone, especially if your speaker has never made a presentation online. Yet, all this will make your learning process more effective.
Provide your presenter with a moderator responsible for organizational aspects during the presentation like answering questions via chat or helping attendees with technical problems. This will help to release tension from the presenter and increase the quality of webinars.
The key point is the presentation itself and material for webinars. All preparation works will be in vain if training consists of delivering lectures and nothing more. You need to take care not only of interesting information but the form of delivering and interaction with listeners. Read the main recommendations on how to prepare top material for webinars to make your presentations engaging and catchy indeed.
While you prepare materials, proceed with announcements. Here you can read on how to write it. Send out invitations starting from 1 month before the event. With the help of the webinar platform, you will be able to set up a series of email reminders about the upcoming events. It is important that emails arrive at the same time, and employees will understand this is not a single-time thing and proper serious attention should be paid to them.
It often happens that while webinars remain a novelty the employees demonstrate interest towards them and do not miss them. Yet, fighting for their attention should start from the very first lesson, as you can not only fail in getting them to the next meeting but also lose their interest after the introductory 20 minutes. Your main enemies here are monotony, reading from your notes, the absence of presentation structure and communication with attendees, increased the duration of the webinar, technical problems. Take these into account in order to get your attendees watch your webinar till the very end.
Contests, encouragement, small awards based on the results of the lessons held will help you to retain an interest of employees to the new component of the corporate culture.
Feedback is very important, though it is often disregarded. Some people are afraid of being criticized, while others are not interested in long-term results. Yet, effective training of employees involves working with feedback and wishes. This way, attendees feel that webinars are held for them indeed, but not just for the sake of holding them. At the same time, you will be able to improve each of your new presentation.
To obtain feedback from attendees, you can start a survey at the end of the webinar. You could ask about what people like and what they do not, as well as things they would change. There should not be many questions, and you will be able to pay the required attention to them after the classes are over.
We advise you to record your webinars. First of all, you will have a possibility to analyze your presentations. Secondly, participants will be able to watch it once again in case they need to refresh their knowledge. In the third row, this could grow into a great video lessons series for other employees and newcomers that were not able to attend the webinar.
To record webinars at MyOwnConference, you do not need to install additional software. All you need to do is to press a button before your webinar starts or set up automatic recording. Later on, you will be able to publish recordings at the company’s website or send links to them to employees.
Webinar platform will offer you convenient statistics regarding your event. You only need to decide on the parameter you are interested in: attendance, the number of attendees have left feedback, results of tests held. Maybe you will prefer to target the post-webinar goals like a boost of sales, productivity, changes in management strategy, or team spirit. In any case, describe the criteria important for you and measure them consistently.
Do not forget to analyze the presentation itself, improve organization and holding of webinars, as webinars are not simply a new stream, they are rather an efficient and evolving means of learning and completing corporate tasks.