Training new employees is a necessary task, but it’s costly, it’s time-consuming and your employees still ask questions for weeks. Yet, employee trainings are critical to setting your employees up for success (lest you have an employee that causes a mishap like this).
Often, we just stick with the same old training we’ve been doing for years. Maybe it’s a haphazard powerpoint presentation, or a super long training manual that no one will read, or a training video that should have been updated 10 years ago, or maybe, if you’re employees are lucky, it’s an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida where 20 employees are brought up to speed at once.
At WebinarJam, we put a lot of emphasis on using webinars to sell. After all, we’re a company that creates software designed by marketers for marketers. But, did you know that webinars are also one of the most effective tools for training your employees? Here’s why.
Webinars Are More Affordable and Convenient
On average, companies spend $1,252 per employee on training and development. And that number is even higher ($1,605) for small companies because they don’t have as many existing resources in place and require more one-on-one attention.
Why so expensive? Well, if you’re batch training employees, you need someone to organize the event, find a venue (if not within your office), pay for food and refreshments, as well as pay for handouts and materials. Not to mention, if you have employees from all over the country, you’ll also be paying for flights and hotels.
With a webinar, the majority of those costs go poof. You can batch-train employees all over the country from one single location. No need for flights, hotels or even commutes to a venue. And, while we’re on the topic, no need for a venue either.
Plus, with WebinarJam webinars you share files and handouts directly with attendees so they can download them, without the associated costs of printing. And, if you train employees from the comfort of their homes, you no longer need to purchase food and drinks.
Your costs essentially become the time it takes to conduct the training and the price of the webinar platform. Did we mention WebinarJam is only $39.99 a month when paid annually?
You Can Engage Employees More Effectively
It seems counter-intuitive, right? How does a webinar which is virtual get more engagement than an in-person training?
Well, why do people who don’t say a word in real life comment on everything on the entire internet (seriously, why)?
The internet is like a mask of sorts, making us more comfortable to speak up and ask what we really want. Shy employees are more likely to ask a question they might have been too embarrassed to ask in an in-person group setting.
Plus, you can engage your employees with polls along the way. Use a poll to take the temperature of the room about their knowledge on a certain subject. Or use polls to create a sort of “pop quiz” to test if your trainees understand the topic you just went over. For example, if you run a property management company, your poll may look something like:
How should service requests be completed?
A: Easiest to most challenging
B: Most challenging to easiest
C: In the order they are received with emergencies taking priority
D: Whatever order the maintenance supervisor wants to do them in
If the majority of employees answer correctly, you can move on. If not, you may want to spend a bit more time on the topic.
You can even send out a survey ahead of time to get a feel for what your employees know and what they don’t, allowing you to tailor your webinar training to the areas they need to strengthen most.
You Can Keep Track of Who’s Been Trained
In the real world, it can be a challenge to keep track of who got trained on what. With a webinar, it’s just part of the process. You can see exactly who attended what training and for how long. You can see if a certain employee snuck out early or stayed until the end. And you can keep track of all the questions they asked and how engaged they were by looking at the chat log.
This is especially handy if you have many different trainings for differing tasks. For example, you may have a generic training along with a training for billing customer service reps, a training for technical customer services reps and so on. If you want an employee to grow their role, you can see which trainings they’ve attended and which they still need to get up to speed on.
You Have Recordings of All Trainings
Do you remember the last time you started a new job? It was overwhelming, right? There are so many things to know about the company and day-to-day procedures that your brain seems to be teetering on the brink of explosion at any moment.
You have a couple options in a traditional training (unless you’re a genius with a perfect memory). You can scramble to take notes throughout the training, or you can ask your supervisor to take time out of their day to reteach you the aspects of your job you can’t remember.
With webinars, you no longer have to do either. WebinarJam automatically records your webinars so your new employees can access them later, re-watching until they feel confident with the material. If a week down the line they can’t remember how to do a certain task, they can just plug back into the replay and watch, sparing them the embarrassment of asking. And for those employees who process a little slower, they can re-watch and pause at their own pace, making the learning process that much easier.
You Can Automate Trainings
Do you find yourself bringing on new employees in trickles and repeating the same training over and over again?
If so, you should consider automating. Automating is ideal for a general overview of the company trainings and basic day-to-day procedures (how to access your company email, servers, etc.).
The benefit of using an automated webinar is you can record your training once, get it perfectly set up and show it over and over again to new employees, while keeping them engaged throughout. And it keeps your valuable employees productive, so they aren’t spending hours every few weeks training someone new, but instead doing work that earns your business money.
Unlike a regular recording of your webinar, with EverWebinar your trainees will have no idea your webinar is a recording. You can even keep a single employee online during the training to answer chat questions in real time.
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Whether you’re training employees for a big corporate company or a small startup, a webinar is an affordable way to get everyone up to speed engagingly and effectively; all while allowing trainees to rewatch at their own pace.
Have you ever attended a webinar employee training? How was it? Let us know in the comments below.
