Should Your Staff Training Be Physical or Digital?

When you’re trying to figure out the best way to introduce employees to the world of your business, there’s a delicate balance that you have to strike. You want them to feel comfortable and encouraged to incorporate their own skills and experience into the role – yet at the same time, you also want to train them on exactly how you want them to work while at your business.

Taking a more personal, person-to-person approach to training might give you a greater degree of control over this balance, but the digital option might prove to be much more efficient across multiple hires.

Pros of Physical

The person-to-person approach allows you to consistently communicate with the employee and ensure that they understand what is being asked of them. It also develops a two-way system where they can ask you questions and better clarify what they’re uncertain about. In this way, rather than information just being thrown at them, they’re integrating it more organically – though this naturally depends on the person providing them with the information in the first place.

What’s more, the person or people who are providing the new hire with this introduction to your business may well be their co-workers in the time to come. That means that this serves a double purpose, allowing your staff members to get to know people in a natural way.

Why Digital?

However, going over every minute detail every time that you hire someone might be something that begins to take more and more time out of your employees’ time. A digital onboarding process, most usually provided through training materials on intranet platforms that can be developed with www.claromentis.com, allows the new staff member to get the knowledge that they need at their own pace. Obviously, you might have deadlines for when certain tests or assessments need to be completed by so that you can be confident they’re as up to speed as they need to be, but it’s a less-pressurized environment.

While it can seem as though a person-to-person approach would always be capable of providing a more qualitative and informative result, the stress of having to retain information while it’s being delivered to you can be difficult for some people. Therefore, e-learning can sometimes be a preferable approach.

Striking the Balance

Of course, the right answer will always be found in some degree of balance. Abandoning your employees to digital platforms for the entirety of their learning might have poor results, and without any sort of reference materials, you could find that they struggle to remember information as well as you’d like.

The key here is support. You want them to know that they have places to go if they feel as though they’re unsure. Whether this is back to the e-learning platforms or through the support of their colleagues might be up to them, but for the latter to feel enticing, you have to do what you can to build up that sense of trust and teamwork within your structure.