It’s important to understand that your employees are ultimately only as good as the tools you’ve given them to work with. We explain five great reasons you should embrace online employee training in this article.
Perhaps the most essential of those tools is information – training is an inherently valuable way to not only better communicate your expectations but also guarantee that people are doing what you need, when you need it, in the exact way that you need it, no exceptions.
With that in mind, more and more organisations of all types are making the jump to online employee training with great effect. There are five really good reasons in particular why this is something you’ll want to consider that are certainly worth exploring.
Save time AND money in one fell swoop
Maybe the biggest reason why online employee training programs are a good idea is also the most immediate: you free up valuable time and money to be put to better use elsewhere in your organisation.
When you invest in online employee training, you’re creating one rigidly constructed “class” that can be taken anywhere, at any time, from any device. You don’t have to figure out a schedule for an in-person class that works for everyone or offer different time slots to account for different schedules.
You create the class (and pay for it) once and then users can take it immediately. So not only do you have materials you can use to properly train your existing employees right away, but that collateral is also “evergreen” – meaning that you can use it to help on-board new hires in the future, too, without worrying about scheduling additional in-person classes.
The power of informational consistency
Another one of the major reasons why these training videos are a good idea has to do with how important informational consistency is to the ongoing success of your organisation.
With an in-person classroom environment, you’re often dealing with different instructors who could have wildly different methods when it comes to approaching even straightforward ideas and materials.
These different approaches can easily create varying success rates among your employees. Some may have a hard time grasping certain concepts entirely because of the instructor they’re working with, creating a skills gap in your business where you cannot afford one.
With training videos, however, you’re in complete control over the lesson and how it is conveyed to your employees. Everyone receives the same information at all levels and inconsistency becomes one less thing you have to worry about.
Multiple locations? No problem
As many businesses continue to expand in the modern era, it’s common for even mid-sized organisations to have multiple locations that can be spread out across a city or even multiple cities depending on the circumstances.
In a traditional in-person training environment, all of the inherent problems you’re dealing with are essentially multiplied based on the number of locations you’re working with.
Having a hard time finding a training schedule that meets everyone’s needs at “Site A”? That becomes a unique problem at “Site B” and “Site C,” too. Everything, including your costs, is multiplied exponentially – which is another area where online training comes in handy.
Online employee training gives you an invaluable opportunity to train multiple locations at various times with NO additional cost because the materials themselves have already been created. The money you’re saving can then be funneled back into your business in the areas where it will do the most good.
Image: Stock Snap
Insight and visibility
One of the biggest advantages of online employee training, however, comes by way of the increased visibility you’ll have over the entire process. With the right tools, you can digitally track and assess training completion so that you can guarantee people are actually taking and understanding the lessons on your terms.
So if you identify a particular employee who needs a bit of additional help, you can easily look back at their training schedule and see why. Maybe it’s because they never took the course, or maybe they had an issue in one particular area that you can then work on.
In any event, you suddenly have actionable information that you can use to stop a small problem now before it becomes a bigger one down the road – thus creating a more effective approach to training across the board.
Easy access, easy results
Finally, perhaps the biggest reason why online employee training is something worth investing in has to do with how you’re providing employees with effortless access to the information they need to know to do their jobs.
Employees don’t have to worry about coming in on their day off or staying late to take the required training. You don’t have to deal with the associated overtime costs or any additional expenses. In a way, this is directly related to the reason why OTT content has become so popular in the last decade – users can bend the content to fit their needs, instead of sacrificing their needs because of the limitations of the content.
Is one of your employees sitting in an airport lounge waiting for their plane to take off? They can take a training course. Are they stuck on a particularly long morning commute? They can take a training course.
They’re not at a disadvantage because they have a laptop computer instead of a tablet, and they certainly don’t have to worry about sacrificing important time with their family on a weekend.
In Summary
All told, you get an effective way to create complete, end-to-end control over your approach to employee training and your workers get access to an effective, engaging way to learn what they need to know in order to do better work every day.
It’s the textbook definition of a mutually beneficial situation and it’s one that is only available for organisations willing to embrace the power of online employee training with open arms.
About the Author
PJ is the founder of Uscreen, a video monetisation platform that helps video content creators distribute their content safely and profitably online or through over-the-top (OTT) devices.
