Live (but not in Person) Training
September 18, 2008
Those charged with training and managing a mobile workforce need to call upon a variety of communication methods and tools to connect with far-flung teams.
By Jean Thilmany
ot long ago, Colleen Garton hopped on an elevator next to a coworker she spoke with every day.
"I just stood there with my mouth open. She was eight months pregnant," Garton says. "When did that happen?"
If Garton spoke with this woman every day, why was she so surprised by the pregnancy? The answer is easy. They spoke via telephone. Though they were members of the same work team, they rarely saw each other in person.
For today's workers, Garton's situation is far from uncommon. At the time of the elevator run-in, Garton was project manager at a large company. She's since founded training consultancy Garton Consulting Group of San Diego, CA, to help trainers and managers best work with teams and workers located far and wide.
So how do trainers best train today's mobile workforce, whose members can be spread across states or, increasingly, nations? Often even the trainers themselves work from remote locations, separated from the employees they train and from each other.
That's why those charged with training and managing a mobile workforce need to call upon several communication methods and tools to connect with far-flung teams, Garton says.
For the last year, Barbara Thompson has helped train financial aid administrators at colleges and universities using a specialized training capability offered via Web conferencing tool WebEx. Thompson is training manager at USA Funds of Indianapolis, which trains the administrators on new or upgraded policies and procedures. USA Funds trainers themselves are former financial aid administrators.
Before bringing in Web conferencing capabilities, Thomp-son's 10 trainers would visit schools two to three times a week for in-person seminars and workshops. So trainers were on the road all the time. And exhausted. Also, the administrators were clamoring for shorter training sessions spread over a few days, rather than the all-day affairs needed when a trainer flew into town.
The move to the Web training tool sounds like a no-brainer—after all, it allowed Thompson's company to slash its travel budget and offer shorter bursts of training rather than all-day sessions—but the change still didn't come easily, Thompson says.
She and her training team met with WebEx consultants who offered simple tips for long-distance training. Their main tip: Keep it interesting. After all, the audience is staring at a screen rather than interacting with a live person, so trainers need to ramp up the visuals and offer many opportunities for interaction.
"We knew that to be effective we had to be entertaining, provide good information, and engage the audience," Thompson says. "We changed the look of our PowerPoint slides to make them more visually appealing." Changing the look included adding more graphics and brighter colors.
Two USA Funds trainers now head each online training session, rather than the one trainer who traveled to a college in the past. Thompson finds that having two people speaking makes the presentation more interesting to listeners.
To ensure participation, her trainers also utilize several interactive features offered within the tool itself. For instance, participants can raise their hands virtually, allowing trainers to ask questions of the audience. This helps individual members of a training group—who may be perched in front of monitors around the globe—feel like part of the same group. "I can ask, as I would with a class right in front of me, 'How many of you have done this before,' and they can raise their hands like they would if the training were done in person," Thompson says.
Icons, displayed as hands, allow all participants to view the raised hands. Other capabilities include an online testing engine with a grading function, and the capability to allow members to break into small groups and speak privately—via instant messaging, which furthers teambuilding.
The shift toward online training tools didn't happen without some conflict, mainly on the part of the trainers, Thompson says. In the initial stages, the trainers had a hard time addressing a computer screen rather than a room full of faces. "Getting beyond that was a culture challenge," Thompson admits.
Right Tool for the Job
But training doesn't end when the session is complete, as every trainer knows. Maintaining communication and connection is even more important if team members don't often interact and communicate face to face. Garton recommends making use of the everyday communication tools many workers already use. "The tools we all like to use—e-mail, phone, and Web spaces—can act as a virtual workspace," she says.
But they also include an air of formality. In the workplace, employees mainly use them to ask their managers very specific questions about how something is done. For that reason, Garton instead favors instant messaging (IM) for keeping in touch long distance, which she says encourages relationship building. "It's the equivalent of walking by the office to see if the manager is busy," she says. "People don't feel like they're bothering someone with an IM. If you don't get a message back, they don't take it personally."
And they'll be inclined to try again, keeping those lines of communication open, which is always the training goal—whether online or in person.
Sidebar: Quick Mobile Training Tips
Visit www.trainingmag.com/remote to read "Tips for Remote Training."
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