With remote working on the rise, webinars have become a common internal training tool. The importance of webinars during Covid-19 is seen across many industries — education, manufacturing, logistics… Industry experts all over the world are sharing their knowledge through online talks.

The benefits of live webinars for internal teams

Meanwhile, many companies are moving employee training to virtual platforms. This allows them to continue developing their workforce while adhering to Covid-19 safety measures. This article will explore seven benefits of using webinars over in-person training.

You might know that many businesses use webinars for marketing and sales, but you probably didn’t know about the benefits of webinars for internal teams. A webinar does not require fancy equipment and costs a lot less than face-to-face training.

Employees who believe they’ve been provided opportunities to grow professionally tend to be less likely to quit their jobs than others. In this article, you’ll learn how to make employee growth a part of your company culture by leveraging webinars.

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Why is employee training necessary?

Your top employees value training as much as you do. According to the stats, 74% of workers want to learn relevant skills or re-train to remain employable. Yet, 59% of employees claim that they had no workplace training and that most of their skills were self-taught.

Employee training is crucial to the growth of your business. It’ll reduce employee turnover rates. 59% of millennials claim development opportunities are highly significant when deciding whether to apply for a position.

What are the types of employee training?

The goal of employee training could be to help employees connect with the why, how and what of a company. It might also teach employees to become better at their roles and responsibilities as skills and competencies increase rapidly for many positions.

The type of training you receive as an employee will depend on your role and situation.

Types of employee training

Leadership training

This training focuses on interpersonal skills and persuasion skills for leading a team. This is usually offered to employees who are on track for managerial positions or who have recently been promoted to leadership positions.

Orientation training

This is to familiarize new hires with your workplace culture, vision, and core values. The orientation training aims to introduce new hires to the basics of working at your company. It includes office tours, mandatory paperwork, workplace setups, and login credentials.

Compliance training

Topics for compliance training could cover safety, security, technical and legal training — everything employees must know for smooth operations. Old and new employees should receive compliance training whenever new information or responsibilities change your company’s processes.

Onboarding training

Onboarding is also for new hires. While orientation training familiarizes employees with the company, onboarding shows them the tools they need to get work done. It also shows them support resources and people they should contact for help and reporting.

Soft skills training

According to a recent study, workers who received soft skills training were 12% more productive than those who did not. Training on soft skills like active listening, team communication and public speaking will help you advance your career.

Technical training

It refers to on-the-job training to increase your technical skills. Usually, specialized training focuses on software and tools of the trade. It can be more involved depending on the tool or software covered. You may hire an expert to train your staff or ask one of your most experienced employees to teach others.

Sales training

Nowadays, employees also have to be brand evangelists. They should be able to answer any question and promote the unique features of your product or service. Sales training utilizes role-playing to show employees how to sell their company’s products or services.

What is a webinar?

Webinars are live presentations held online via webcasting technology. They’re similar to seminars, but they use webcasting instead of physical space. These meetings often focus on sharing knowledge, ideas, and news with others around the globe. Webinars can help you build and nurture relationships, establish yourself as an expert, or showcase products.

Benefits of webinars for employee training

1. Improves job performance

In a 2019 report published in The International Journal of Business and Management Research, 90% of employees agreed or strongly agreed that online employee training and development programs improved their job performance.

But not every employee training program gets the job done. Establishing a process for measuring growth helps determine the effectiveness of an employee training program. A progress measurement system has to be in place, whether you’re trying to teach compliance or teaching salespeople how to get leads. One of the benefits of webinars for businesses is that it offers a way to track employee progress.

Comparing trainees’ competencies before and after training can help leaders make effective decisions. They can create more targeted training and place the right people in the right roles using insights from these measurements.

2. Access anytime, anywhere

Remote training tools offer a flexible way to learn in the ever-evolving workplace. Locations and time zones are irrelevant. Your employees can access training from anywhere at any time without traveling.

This is a significant advantage, especially in the age of remote work, where it’s customary to have employees working from a thousand miles away.

Say Leah is a manager in a mid-sized tech company in the US, and they have just hired two talented web developers. One of their web developers is based in the Philippines, and the other is in Canada. Leah wants them onboarded at the same time. Unfortunately, the company would have to pay for both these developers to travel down to the US. This will cost a lot of money and time. On the other hand, the company could send over webinar recordings from a previous live session with another web developer they hired.

So, webinars are easily accessible anywhere, mainly when they are recorded and stored. Thus, employees can access the same webinar anytime, for as long as they need to. This means that they can easily jog their memory about new concepts and hone their skills anytime.

3. Eliminate unnecessary travel and in-person training costs

With online training, you eliminate speaking fees, catered lunches, and the cost of booking a presentation space. Participants can watch the training from the comfort of their rooms without having to expend money and time on travel.

All you need to do is set up your MyOwnConference account, which makes it easy to set up webinars, create an event, and have trainees join your event remotely. By eliminating travel costs, you’ll have more money left to invite subject-matter experts and improve the quality of training employees receive.

From our earlier example, let’s say Leah stuck with the first option. She would spend up to $10,000 on travel costs and possibly temporary accommodation. Aside from this, she will waste a lot of time. With a recorded webinar, she only needs a webinar software subscription. Myownconference offers one of the cheapest options on the market at $29.

An online webinar can be scheduled as quickly as a team meeting. This frees up your time to focus on what matters most: preparing the content and the learning outcomes.

Read also: 7 Webinar Integrations To Get Most From Your Online Events

4. Reuse content

As mentioned before, one big benefit of webinars is that they can be accessed anytime from anywhere. In addition, live webinar recordings can be reused time and time again at no additional cost once they are recorded.

For an on-field sales agent who needs to master cold calling scripts, it’s as simple as clicking over to a recorded webinar to refresh his memory.

Webinars make course design easier. Sessions in employee training programs can be updated and improved — there is no need to start over. You can reorganize information more quickly. Employees can access information fast with features that support subtitles, pause and rewind, and reviews. It is constructive in highly technical fields.

With information security and privacy issues becoming a growing concern, some people might argue that these sessions are not as secure as physical and print formats.

Yet employee training software programs like MyOwnConference provide two-factor authentication options for tighter security of confidential or sensitive information. In addition, today, digital information storage is more secure than print formats, which can get lost or distributed without permission.

5. Improve employee engagement

No one likes day-long workshops. And not every one of your employees would attend them. Webinars offer a more interesting alternative. Your employees can watch and digest information at their own pace and in their own homes. When they have questions, instead of the awkward feeling of being the only person raising their hand in a meeting, they can use live chat to ask their questions. There could also be a question and answer session, making it all the more interactive.

Therefore, selecting webinar software that allows real-time communication between participants is critical. 82% of employees think interactive videos (including quizzes, additional material, or personalization) keep them more interested than traditional videos. Some tools to drive employee training webinars’ engagement include a live chat, polls, digital whiteboards, screen share, and file sharing features. Whiteboards with digital highlighters can create a classroom-like effect.

6. Get experts involved

You don’t want to create half-arsed employee training programs. Engaging, innovative, and advanced training creates meaningful memories for trainees.

Ultimately, empowering subject-matter experts to develop resources for your team is ideal. However, unlike in-person training, your expert doesn’t need to be physically present to conduct sessions. For instance, flying an expert is unnecessary if you aim to boost your sales team’s productivity. Instead, you can have them join a webinar with your team.

Moreover, senior-level employees at your company could fill in as experts for the webinar if you don’t want to hire a professional instructor.

Your focus needs to be on capturing their knowledge and making it available to the rest of your organization. It will make your organization more agile.

When you have an expert on a particular skill on your team, you can conduct sessions to train other experts in your company and dominate your market. That’s because one of the advantages of being an expert is having customers come directly to you to seek your advice.

7. Adapt to remote work

Adapting to today’s constantly changing technology requires regular upskilling, and training and development programs offer this opportunity. One of the things managers have to deal with in remote working is that there would be less supervision. While it encourages innovation and risk-taking to improve processes, it also necessitates setting the right frameworks. A remote workforce can lead to a lack of team engagement. Practical remote training can be used from the very beginning to motivate, activate, and energize new employees.

Virtual training through webinars, on-demand videos and other mediums should go hand-in-hand with remote work.

Here’s one thing to understand, though, one of the most significant disadvantages of webinars for live training is that it only guarantees attendees’ focus to a certain extent. Nonetheless, exposure to household distractions and background noise is inevitable. Hence, you need to remind remote workers that training requires their full attention. You should also consider work from home training for employees, including training in time and energy management.

Read also: Tips For Conducting an Interview Remotely

Have you started using webinars for workplace training?

You’ve seen the importance of employee training in the workplace to help reduce turnover rates and energize your team. And you’ve seen the benefits of webinars for conducting these trainings. Webinars are among the most effective ways to train employees, mainly when you include follow-up quizzes to refresh trainees’ memory.

MyOwnConference is a webinar platform for low-cost live webinars. Choose either the free or paid options for webinar software with built-in recording, audience interaction tools, and emails with flexible pricing.