How Presentation Software Simplifies Virtual Training and Onboarding
In today's digital world, remote training and onboarding sessions are becoming more prevalent, presenting new challenges given the huge difference between training people virtually as opposed to onsite. Remote training and onboarding can be difficult for many reasons, including: the absence of face-to-face communication; difficulty conveying emotions via email, text messages, or messaging platforms without tone of voice or facial expressions; the inability to see how someone is responding and their nonverbal cues; and a lack of team-building opportunities.
To respond to these challenges, leaders should look to create effective onboarding and training content by using powerful presentation software. These tools allow businesses to integrate interactive elements, high-quality assets and data-driven analytics. Effective use of these tools empowers companies to overcome most of the challenges posed by the evermore prevalent work-from-home environment.
Creating Engaging Virtual Training Using Interactive Elements
Integrating interactive elements into virtual training material deepens engagement among trainees. Engagement through involvement is one of the most effective ways of communicating a message. By including interactive page types (Impact, Video, Scrollmotion, Compare), trainees are immersed in the course material making for more effective content retention.
The more engaged trainees are with your presentation, the more time they'll spend with it and the bigger impact it will have. This high level of interactivity also eliminates the possibility of trainees shutting off and coasting through virtual training sessions.
Presentation software also allows for customization, so you have the facility to tweak, add, or remove sections when evaluating if your session is progressing well or not. This customization enables companies to direct focus to topics that need additional attention and training. Adding interactivity to virtual training and onboarding also adds a human touch to the session and trainees are more likely to feel more valued which in turn raises motivation levels.
Consider creating a curated welcome kit for new employees to ensure that they get off to a smooth start. Using interactive presentation software such as Ingage allows for the integration of a number of interactive elements. You can embed welcome videos, Q&As, blog posts and motivational messages from your company's top performers.
Using presentation software to bring slides to life is an effective way to enhance virtual training sessions and foster company culture early on. Elements such as supporting voiceovers, graphics and navigation bars also encourage new employees to engage with the course materials on their own.
Analytics: The Eyes and Ears of an Online Presentation
Managers face a variety of challenges when conducting virtual training sessions. One of the many drawbacks—and a major one considering trainees are in a remote setting—is that course facilitators find it difficult to gauge the degree of audience involvement. They cannot, for example, monitor if trainees are fully engaged, going through the materials, or grasping the content.
To offset these challenges, businesses can leverage Ingage’s powerful analytical feature that’s built into our interactive presentation software: its metrics yield valuable insights into the effectiveness of online presentations. With this information, managers can hone in on specific aspects that need improvement to deliver more relevant and engaging presentations.
Behavioral Insights
The objective nature of the data-driven insights provided by analytics empowers managers with a tool to evaluate the impact of their virtual training sessions. It allows them to analyze the behavior of trainees and plan around these traits accordingly.
Analytics paints a picture of each employee’s strengths and weaknesses which enables focussed interventions. It shows which slides they spend the most time on, whether they’re focusing enough on key brand elements, or if they’re skipping certain parts of the presentation.
Crunching the data provided by the analytics feature allows managers to customize training for individual employees. It helps identify weak spots and problem areas, even allowing you to compare data with your company’s top performers.
Analytics provides businesses with massive amounts of data that they can dissect to evaluate their training methods. This objectivity brings science-like precision to an area that has traditionally relied on a trial-and-error approach to training methods.
Ingage offers a powerful set of analytics that allows you to easily track your employees' performance. The data collected can be broken down into important elements such as presentation usage, behavioral patterns and employee output so managers can with pinpoint accuracy identify areas for improvement in order to get remote teams performing optimally. Using analytics to guide your training approach is mutually beneficial to both the trainee and the trainer and will raise motivation and productivity levels.
Develop Effective Onboarding Kits Using Rich Content
As a business, the first impression you present is crucial. The onboarding process should reflect well on your company and be engaging for trainees in order to create an overall positive experience. Onboarding packs are an essential part of preparing new hires for their new roles and should contain the necessary information to facilitate a smooth integration into your company and its culture: from building connections with teammates and familiarizing themselves with your company’s technology to setting themselves up to efficiently manage remote work.
An important aspect of creating effective onboarding kits is that they foster employee excitement and engagement through replacing standard PDFs, PowerPoints and word documents with interactive online presentations that include rich content such as videos or HTML pages. These can be used in tandem alongside audio files, for example, to create a more immersive experience for employees who will use these materials on computers while also being able to listen at the same time depending on what device you're using. It's been shown that this method leads to increased retention rates.
Trainees generally have many questions about the company and its policies, and onboarding is the most opportune time to answer those. Using Ingage as an onboarding presentation software is a great way to ensure your company makes the best first impression possible, making the induction simple while maintaining professionalism.
Interest and engagement can further be maintained throughout the onboarding process by using varying layouts, interactivity, multi-image pages, consistency and builds. A build is an animation tool that can be applied to presentations to reveal, hide and move content on the slide sequentially. This controls the flow of information, preventing users from reading ahead while creating focus-inducing variation.
Onboarding is an influential factor in company success, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG): their research shows that entities with dynamic onboarding processes record 1.9 times bigger profit margins and 2.5 times more revenue growth than organizations with poor onboarding practices.
Keep It Simple
It’s easy to get carried away when creating training presentations by the number of exciting and interactive options available for use. However, it’s especially important in today’s work-from-home environment to keep presentations simple and relevant without sacrificing the use of high-quality assets. In short, cut down on the ‘visual noise.’
Visual noise is the term used to describe anything happening on a slide that gets in the way of connecting with an audience or them not understanding what they’re looking at. This problem manifests itself through information overload, unnecessary graphics, as well as animations that are out of context.
Simple is better, so keep your presentation that way by sticking to the basics such as timing slides appropriately so people can read (and understand) them easily instead of using animated text boxes while you talk about something different from one paragraph down.
By sticking to fairly simple animations such as fade, float, zoom, push, as well as cut and appear, you can encourage focus without sacrificing performance. Striking this balance is crucial if you want your onboarding kits to be effective.
Including more than what is required in your online onboarding presentations will backfire and create the opposite effect of the intended objective: to transmit information that is clear, concise and coherent.
Equip Your Team With the Tools to Compete
Think of the power you have at your fingertips when creating virtual training and onboarding presentations. Just because training and onboarding mostly take place now in virtual spaces doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality and effectiveness.
With Ingage-powered platforms, users can create presentations that leverage digital tools for maximum effect. Rich, engaging content generates interest and creates a powerful first impression. Interactivity involves the audience, increasing retention rates. Behavioral analytics empowers you to measure the impact of your presentations.
Register for a demo today and get your new team members up and running with Ingage’s dynamic presentation software.