After almost one year of pandemic conditions, people got used to working from home and to limiting physical interactions with others. For a company, adapting to the new social reality implies not only to protect the employees by working from home but also to change the business strategy and to revise the priorities. So the training, that never has been a priority for most of the companies, becomes a “nice to have but not now” activity.
In this environment, most of the training suppliers on the local market rushed-up to show they are viable and active; plenty of so called “free on-line training sessions” were organized. Unfortunately, most of these on-line training sessions proved to be a kind of webinar where a tutor is speaking over a PowerPoint presentation and the participants are simply listening. I said “unfortunately” because participants learned that an on-line training has to be this way.
In actuality, on-line training should be interactive; participants should be able to talk and activities should be part of the training. Is that possible? Of course it is. First of all by keeping in mind when designing the training that the participants will not be next to each other during the session. Secondly, by choosing the appropriate communication platform that provides video, chat, break rooms, a whiteboard, polls, sharing options and other tools to facilitate on-line interactions. And last but not least by adapting the pace of the delivery to on-line specifically, using rather micro-sessions and frequent breaks instead of a daylong session.
But a question is still to be answered: how can we redefine people’s perception?