Distance Training, Video Conferencing, and Other Ways to Simplify Your On-Boarding Process
Every human resources professional sometimes feels like they’re playing a very expensive game of Russian Roulette with every new hire, and who can blame them? Finding, vetting, and training new employees is an expensive and time-intensive process. According to Investopedia, training costs for even a minimum wage employee can total $3500 (around 3200 Euros), and that cost only rises with higher level jobs that require more training.
A streamlined hire and on-boarding process will get your new employees settled in and producing good work more quickly, and it will also save your company a significant investment in money and time. How can you do that? One of your options is simple: utilizing video conferencing services.
The Advantages of Video Conferencing
Video conferencing is quickly becoming and indispensable tool in the world of business and commerce, as we move in to the first truly global economy and many daily business and trade operations move online. This powerful communication tool has found a loyal user base in one very specific segment of the business world: human resources professionals.
According to a study by Redmark Research, 98 percent of human resources workers named video conferencing as their favorite method of communication and collaboration, beating out conference calls and even one of the fastest and most traditional methods of electronic communication, email. Video conferencing combines the long distance communication and convenience of email with the ease and intimacy of an in-person meeting: an invaluable combination in a field that’s all about effective and personal communication.
Interactive and Uniform Training
After a few years on the job market, all of us are familiar with the training video: sometimes helpful, more often cringe inducing, and difficult to for a large group of new hires to engage with. Unfortunately, for large companies, the next best alternative is flying a trainer to various locations to conduct in person training.
Video conferencing offers a perfect compromise: an interactive, in person training that can be broadcast wherever it needs to be seen. A trainer in Paris can conduct online seminars for new employees in Lyon, Amsterdam, and New York, all in the same day, and each group of employees sees the same content and learns the same information. In addition to being live rather than pre-recording, advances in video conferencing hardware and software make video conferences more interactive than ever. Using an interactive setup like Blue Jean’s video conference systems, new hires can easily ask questions via text or video, and receive personalized responses and feedback.
The wide reach of video conferencing seminars also makes cross training easy, an absolute necessity for an effective on-boarding process, according to the experts at Inc.com. An effective team has employees who can cover multiple rolls depending on the needs and the situation, and interactive training seminars make cross-training as simple as asking a few new employees to sit in for a session. No travel arrangements, no logistics, and very little time lost. With the right video conferencing system you can even give your employees the option to join any training that strikes their interest, from the comfort of their own home and their own smartphone!
Unify Your Technology with Broad-Based Compatibility
The benefits of interactive seminars are clear…but how feasible are they? Can you still hold multiple simultaneous trainings if the home office has a dedicated video conferencing room, and the Amsterdam office still runs on a handful of older PCs? Yes – with the right service.
For communicating between multiple offices and across multiple platforms, you need to look for a system that is broadly compatible, or “system agnostic.” What this means is that the system is conveniently designed to run on any hardware or software, and even mobile devices. Blue Jeans also offers video conferencing supported entirely in a browser: all you have to do to start a call is email a link. As long as the other party has a smartphone or tablet with a camera, one click is all it takes to join the call.
Ongoing Enrichment
Training doesn’t end with the first day of work any more than we stop learning the moment we leave school. With video conferencing, you can offer your employees up to date information on policy changes, product launches, and opportunities for improvement that need to be addressed. Vern Hanzlik, a long-time HR expert and Training Magazine contributor, recommends using interactive video conferences to bring in guest speakers and offer professional development seminars, giving your employees as many opportunities as possible to continue to learn and grow.
You may have heard that communication is 90 percent nonverbal: we lose a lot of nuance to emails, phone calls, and memos. A more effective solution is right at your fingertips, so why wait? Adapt a video conferencing network for your business, and give yourself the advantage of the full spectrum of communication!
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