Training a new employee can be a long and difficult process. They have to be educated on the specifics of their new job. If they already know what to do, you still have to show them how your company in particular does things. It takes a lot of the new employee’s time to get up to speed, but also takes an existing employee’s time as well. How can we make this process more efficient, smarter?
It seems like the learning process can be put into two categories; what new hires can learn on their own, and what they have to be taught. Learning on their own is usually handled by handing them as stack of manuals, memos, and rules. I think we can do this better.
What if we were to put all new hire materials on the website? Let them start at an informational hub and work through all the protocols, rules, and SOP themselves. Then when they’re ready, we can setup a web conference with a designated trainer. The two--or more--of them can rapidly go over the material, handle any questions, and all with the documents there “between them”.
At some point though, the new employee will have to meet face-to-face with any number of people, and done one by one could take forever. Addressing them as a group is a better solution for multiple hires, but each group meeting with a different trainer has it’s own time waste to consider. Instead, let’s set up one video conference on a screen in one room with the new hires, and have a parade of trainers and managers address them from anywhere in the world.
And if we do it this way, we don’t even have to have the new hires in that room. They can be at their desks or even at home when they join the video conference. Using this method, we can save hours of training and work time lost to logistics, travel, and herding.
Have you used web or video conferencing in your training programs? Tell us about it in a comment.
