Every business can benefit from organized team-building and training seminars – but barely any small to medium enterprise can afford it to spare much, if anything, to squeeze something like that into the budget.
The benefits of a training seminar are undoubtable. As the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship duly notes, SMEs in the United Kingdom alone make up 99.8 percent of all business organizations, with over half of the country’s employment. Yet they’re also plagued by an incredibly high failure rate. Failing to account for incompetence in the business, or missing crucial mistakes in marketing and sales leads to the death of any company – something training can change.
But how can training seminars be made more accessible to small business owners looking to gain a huge advantage over their competition? And what tips should they take to heart to ensure their company’s success? Thankfully, these questions – and more – have their answers. And none of them will cost you an exorbitant amount of time or money.
Save Yourself the Travel and Space
The first thing on your list of needs would probably be a venue – after all, you need a place and space to actually host the training if you want it to be successful, right? Well, not necessarily.
As a small business owner, what you’re looking for isn’t a traditional training program or seminar – you need a webinar. Space and time are two great reasons why.
1. Space: It’s expensive to rent out a room for a seminar, not to mention getting all the equipment ready for something like that – you need the right number of seats, you need an audio system hooked up around the room, and you need a projector, and so on. While these things can be rented, the prices can be fairly steep for just a simple training seminar.
By utilizing technologies you can use to video conference – Blue Jeans is an example of a premium video calling service – you can not only save on the venue, but you can even save a lot of money either by organizing and doing the training webinar yourself, or by hiring an outside consultant to host a video conference with your individual teams.
2. Time: It takes a lot of time to organize and get to a seminar. Resources are spent getting you from the office to the venue of the seminar – when you could simply have your team undergo the webinar from the comfort of their own desks. According to one high-tech firm interviewed by Lifesize.com, “thousands of people were trained in a much shorter period of time using video conferencing”.
Why spend top dollar on travel and seating, and have your team spend precious work hours on the road and in a stuffy conference room, when you can get the same level of quality from a qualitative video conference? Invest your saved money in a proper Internet connection with unlimited broadband, and do your business a world of good.
Avoid Print-outs, Go Digital
A huge savings point is materials – instead of utilizing print-outs and projectors, simply utilize a premium video conferencing service and opt for screen-sharing, file sharing, and file transfers. It’s easier to send everyone a copy of the PowerPoint presentation for them to go through and review on their own time, than have it projected onto a wall. When the reference material is directly accessible by everyone in the call, it also makes interaction much easier.
People love visual media. And while there’s definitely something to be said for a captivating face-to-face live seminar, small and medium enterprises have to be a lot more conscious of their spending if they want to avoid failure. Thus, the solution is to emulate the success of a training seminar, but virtually – and that includes going through all the motions of a seminar, but without the actual presence of being gathered together in a single room.
Device interoperability is another big plus. Some companies contract their employees to work from home – in which case, it’s perfectly possible to still enjoy a lengthy conference call from a smartphone or tablet device without having worry, especially when one uses a quality service.
Use Real-Time to Save Time
One of the most powerful tools a consultant or contracted trainer can use in a webinar is the screen-sharing tool. By demonstrating techniques and products through screen-sharing, a consultant can display in real-time exactly what an employee should be doing. This is even more effective than using recorded video, because it saves the consultant a good amount of time spent for preparation.
End a Webinar with a Simple Follow-Up
To make sure a training webinar remains effective, small and medium businesses can issue follow-up material and memos to employees per email or otherwise. A webinar is an event – to make sure the lessons learned in a webinar bleed into the average workday, something as simple as a reminder or webinar summary as a follow-up can help bring everything that’s been learned into a refreshed memory.
