In today’s workplace, more and more is happening over video conferencing tools. While there are many advantages to leveraging video in different functions across the business, employee training has seen increasing benefits.
Video conferencing opens a whole new virtual world for employee training. Through video conferencing software, like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, companies can now organize individual or group training worldwide — all without leaving the office or home. It’s a whole new (digital) world for employee training.
Traditional employee training has happened in person, perhaps on an employee’s first day, when they need to learn a new tool or even weeks-long dives into new techniques or trends. While valuable to employee development, these in-person training sessions can be time-consuming and costly for the employer, especially for an SMB with more limited resources or time to spend on it.
One of the benefits of video conferencing is communicating and connecting face-to-face with trainers no matter where they are. This allows employees to absorb and retain the lessons better and pick up further information through gestures, social cues, and facial expressions. Information can also be communicated more quickly and frequently, allowing for more ongoing training and faster decision-making.
In addition, training over video conferences helps save the company time and money. For instance, IBM reported that it could save $600 million just by moving half of its training programs to virtual, thanks in large part to savings on travel and accommodations. On top of that, more employees can be trained at the same time by the same teacher without reserving office space or gathering employees from multiple offices in the same location.
By achieving these economies of scale through video, companies can also increase their consistency of training across regions and large bases of employees. Videos maintain consistent messaging for new employee training and streamlined training for essential functions and skills.
Through video, employers can also record previous training and reuse it in the future, something that is not possible with in-person training. Employees can also leverage the nature of video content to start, pause and stop content to learn at their own pace or even revisit content they feel they need to reinforce more. As a result of this and other factors, a study found that video conferencing helps employees retain 65 percent of training after a week instead of just 35 percent in person.
While video conferencing gets all the attention for helping enable the shift to remote work, the reality is that it brings many more benefits to companies than just the ability to work from your local coffee shop or home office. By tapping into other benefits, such as enhanced employee training, SMBs and other businesses can truly tap into the potential the technology offers.
