Love it or hate it, remote work is here to stay.
An ever-increasing amount of companies (including the likes of Twitter and Square) have decided to allow employees to continue to work remotely. If yours is one of them, the road ahead contains some unique challenges.
You need to keep employees engaged in the company culture. You need to keep providing them with opportunities to sharpen their skills. The need for continuous employee training is real in any work environment, but even more so in remote working.
You know this. That’s why you’ve already invested in remote training.
Remote training allows you to maintain that line of connection with your staff, while also easily tracking their progress. But it’s not always easy to build remote training courses that maximize engagement. You need the right content, yes, but also the right tools. If the pandemic has taught us anything, is that videoconferencing is one of those tools.
Videoconferencing makes remote training more engaging; more human. It also simplifies communication, both within the learning group and between learners and educators.
By integrating videoconferencing with your LMS, you can tap into all these superpowers at will. Below we’ve gathered eight ways a Zoom integration with eFront will help move the needle in your remote training.
How an eFront-Zoom integration can help your training
Recently, eFront added a Zoom integration to promote interactive group learning and real-time collaboration. Curious to see what it can do for you?
It allows your employees more flexibility
Even before 2020, people craved for more flexibility in their working conditions. A Gallup research shows that employees want work to be more than “just a job”. Nowadays, flexibility is quickly becoming one of the most sought-after aspects of a company culture.
As eFront is already optimized for mobile learning, a Zoom integration allows your employees to join videoconferencing sessions from their phone. All they need is the conference details, and the Zoom app on their phone, and they’re all set! That means they can attend more sessions, even when life gets in the way.
Which brings us to our next point.
It simplifies scheduling training sessions
When people work from home, life tends to get in the way a lot. Everyone’s remote working schedule and rhythm is different. Understandably, this makes scheduling Zoom meetings much harder than it was scheduling IRL office ones.
Αn eFront-Zoom integration can simplify that process.
Your educators can log in to the eFront platform and set up a session in just a few steps, selecting the time and date, and adding a title and description.
As for your employees, whether they self-register or are registered by the educator, all they have to do is join. No more hassle when joining a webinar.
Your trusted LMS +a videoconferencing tool at your fingertips = simplicity.
It solves the problem of presession training material distribution
Videoconferencing tools are great for remote employee training. But for your employees to get the most out of a session, they should have some material to study before going in. This can be some background knowledge on the subjects that will be discussed on the call, like introductory articles or infographics. Presession material will help them prepare questions or discussion points — and will save your educator precious time during the session.
If you’ve integrated Zoom with your eFront LMS, your employees can access that material easily on the platform. You can simply upload it as a PDF, PowerPoint presentation, or audio/video material.
And even if you don’t have presession material already at hand, you can always create it directly on the platform.
It boosts communication across the board
Remember how we mentioned maintaining that line of connection with your employees during remote working? A focus on communication is super important for keeping your employees engaged. It’s also going to make all the difference for them during remote training. (Nobody wants to feel they’re struggling alone with difficult material.) An integration between Zoom and eFront can facilitate this.
What many people don’t realize about videoconferencing tools like Zoom is that the chat feature is not there as an afterthought. It’s a valuable tool you should be making more use of.
In an Entrepreneur article, John Rampton highlights the importance of instant messaging on Zoom, both during and outside meetings. During a videoconferencing session, employees can message the group or each other individually without interrupting the speaker. And outside of training sessions, the chat feature can still be used for various purposes, creating channels a la Slack. Employees and educators can use this to comment on past/upcoming meetings or exchange files and notes.
It allows you to assign tests after the training session
Post-session assignments are one of the most direct ways you have to evaluate engagement and information retention. With the eFront+Zoom integration this is no longer a convoluted process. You can create and assign tests to those who participated in a certain session (you know who they are, you’ve tracked them) directly on the platform. The tests can be anything from multiple choice, ordering and filling the blank questions, to free-text responses.
Then, you can easily assess the test results and see if you need to tweak your training content to cover problem areas.
It allows you to cut costs without sacrificing quality
Last but certainly not least: an eFront+Zoom integration helps you save money.
In general, remote training via videoconferencing is a more cost-effective solution than creating an online training course from scratch. (That doesn’t mean it yields perfect results on its own or that it’s appropriate for all subject matter.) Hosting live weekly events that focus on a specific training topic can help you maintain engagement without raising your budget.
Conclusion
Zoom videoconferencing is one of the most important tools in your remote training arsenal. But not everyone uses this tool to the maximum of its capabilities. Having Zoom (or any videoconferencing tool, really) separate from your main LMS, causes unnecessary extra work for you and unnecessary complications for your employees.
Instead, the integration with eFront allows you to make the most out of Zoom — in a simple, easy, and cost-effective way. Try it out today!
