If Prepared, the ROI from Training will Increase Exponentially

Your business is about to recover. You will welcome your former employees back or hire new people to help you run your business in a new and possibly bigger way.

Those are only a few of the reasons why training will become more critical to your success as the world recovers from this pandemic. But there are more reasons, too:

First, the employees who you had before the crisis will need training to refresh their knowledge and add new skills that will allow them to sell and service any new products or services your enterprise added during the previous months.

Second, you will be hiring new employees and getting them up to speed as your franchise starts up, adds new locations, and grows.

Third, you will need to train employees to master and practice a range of skills that became critical during the crisis. During the crisis, the need arose for a new range of protocols to prevent the transmission of the virus from person to person. And there will doubtless be a transition period when your employees will need to continue to practice them. If your business is a restaurant, for example, your patrons might need to be seated at tables that are placed farther apart. New cleaning and sanitizing rules will probably be in place. Your restaurant hosts might even have to learn to take the temperatures of customers when they arrive. There could be a new requirement for your employees to obtain and show specialized certificates that they have earned. And your insurance company, in order to decrease their liability if customers claim that they became ill while visiting your business, could mandate a number of new procedures that you will need to train employees to follow.

How Can You Gear Up to Train During the Recovery?

Here are some of the trends I see emerging.

You will need to use a Learning Management System (LMS), both because you will be training more people and also because there will be an increased emphasis on training documentation. Your insurance company as well as state and federal agencies will want to know that your employees have been trained in skills that will be required to protect public health. The most efficient way to track those activities is to use a modern LMS to monitor and track all the training that is taking place in your organization.

Distributed training will take on new importance as you resume and increase your activities, because you will need a more efficient way to train large groups of employees, possibly in multiple locations. Inviting everyone to headquarters for in-person training will limit your ability to train quickly and efficiently enough to meet the needs of your recovering business. You should be thinking about some more efficient new options, including:

Training managers who travel and visit franchise locations in the field and who are not located in headquarters.

Asynchronous independent training that employees can take at any time, not only when they convene in groups of 30 or more people in classrooms. To support your recovery and growth, you will need to offer more agile, flexible training options. In the past, many companies continued to rely on in-person, instructor-led training. It was by far the number-one way people learned, followed by online training. That has changed.

Virtual led training, a new option for distributed instruction, will become a preferred way to train. This advanced new option allows employees to be flexibly trained online or on their mobile devices by virtual instructors. Videos, quizzes and experiences are embedded in the training, while the LMS tracks what employees have learned and of courses they have completed. Furthermore, training can be effectively delivered in only a few hours every day. That allows employees to keep on top of their work and to absorb a “digestible” amount of information, not to become overloaded with too much information.

Move your franchise operations manual online and allow people to access it during onboarding, when learning to use your franchise systems, and at other times when needs arise. In this way, your operations manual will become a more vital training tool than your old printed manual could ever be.

Your Employees Are Already Ready for Virtual Led Training

In virtual led training sessions, your current and future employees will take part in Zoom and other video meetings. They will move into breakout sessions and enter separate virtual meeting rooms. The good news is, they have already been learning and using those skills during the last few months, by taking part in Zoom and other virtual meetings and social gatherings. They are ready to move forward with virtual led training.

And you should be eager to embrace it too, because it offers a training option that is both efficient and economical, because the expenses of travel, hotel accommodations and food will be dramatically reduced. At the same time, the training you provide will be better, and will deliver a much higher ROI for every training dollar you invest.

We are entering a brave new world of training. Are you ready?