The quality and efficiency of employee training cannot drop even in a telework environment.

Studist Corporation, that develops and sells the visual SOP management platform “Teachme Biz”, is also using Teachme Biz internally within the company.

Among them, Business Enablement Division, which engages in new employee training at the company where several people join every month as the business grows, is required to educate and train newly recruited employees quickly and assign them to the field as a work-ready staff.

Due to the spread of new Coronavirus, our company shifted to telework for all employees before the rest of the world, and we switched from the offline group training that we used to have for new employees to the training online. The person responsible for educating and training employees expressed great anxiety over this change. So how was the training conducted, and was it possible to achieve even greater results than during the offline group training? To find out the answer, I interviewed Akiko Banno, the head of the division.

Taking Coronavirus as an opportunity, we shifted from offline group training to training online.

Several employees join our company every month. In order for new members to play an active role in the departments they are assigned to, my department is responsible for training them to deepen their understanding of the company and services.

At our company, which provides Teachme Biz, we have introduced various cloud services in addition to our services, and have an environment where we can telework anytime. Therefore, we were able to switch to teleworking following the spread of Coronavirus. However, since all new employee training has been conducted face-to-face so far, there were no precedents of conducting new employee training entirely online. Is it possible to train new employees in the same way as offline group training? I was worried that the quality and proficiency would drop. However, as we could not hold the offline group training, the online new employee training using Teachme Biz started.

―――How are you conducting the training?

We use Teachme Biz for our new employee training. For example, we use Teachme Biz to manualize everything, including how to use the tools used in business, explaining the functions of services, how sales members proceed with business meeting, etc. From a large number of manuals we have selected manuals that we want the new employee to study, listed them in a spreadsheet to use as learning materials. The instructor then explains manual content to new employees, and this is how we proceed with the new employee training.

Compared to training using paper materials, Teachme Biz improves comprehension through video and images, has high storagibility, and saves you from printing out the materials. Preparing a training curriculum for each new employee every month took a lot of time. However, with the BETA version of “Training Feature”  released in February 2020, the burden on the education staff has been greatly reduced, as it became possible to easily create a training course by selecting existing manuals and adding them to the course.

―――How are you conducting training for new employees in a telework environment?

After the release of the Training Feature, we immediately switched to company-wide telework, and all the training for members who joined the company in March is planned to be done online.

The training is basically conducted using the web conference system “Zoom” and Teachme Biz.  The education staff will create training courses, in accordance with the employee’s assigned department and duties, and in the order, they want the new employee to learn using Teachme Biz Training Feature. The new employees will be able to check the training course distributed to them.

New employees also feel very nervous because they have just joined the company, and it is an online environment where communication is harder than group training. However, if you can grasp the overview of the training in advance and know what to do during the training period, that anxiety will be reduced by half. Besides, distributing the training courses before the training enables the members to work on pre-learning so you can omit explanations about the lectures, and learning efficiency will dramatically increase.

For example, the lecture, which used to take two hours for group training, has been reduced to 30 minutes by making full use of the pre-learning with the Training Feature. In addition, the fact that the lecture’s content is focused on the explanation of unclear points improves the proficiency level. We can say that it is a great effect on both the education staff and the new employees.

Training Feature screen showing list of the manuals to learn

Teachme Biz maximizes the value of online training.

―――What are the effects of introducing Teachme Biz in induction course/training for new employees?

The advantage of using Teachme Biz is that it is easy to update. In response to the expansion of the new Coronavirus, we switched to teleworking just before the new employees joined the company and reviewed our management policy, which required some major changes from the planned training content. However, using cloud services allowed us to change, modify, and add courses until just before training starts.

Also, by using Teachme Biz as a training tool, the manual for the lecture can be appropriately improved on the spot when the questions and suggestions from new employees received during the lecture. It is really convenient always to be able to use the latest learning materials while updating them.

With Teachme Biz, you can keep track of your learning progress in real-time. Even when there are many trainees, it is possible to communicate in accordance with each trainee’s progress. Also, with Teachme Biz, you can have a grasp of the people who have not progressed in learning, so you can follow up by talking to them and watch over all trainees until they get firmly onboard.

You can see the learning progress of each trainee in a list.

I’m keenly aware of the importance of having a standard operating procedure and an operation manual in place in a telework environment.

I think it would be difficult to switch to a company-wide teleworking in just a day, if we had not managed not only manuals about various working tools and application methods, but also emergency regulations and rules for teleworking centrally on the cloud.

Teachme Biz, that allows you to instantly create and share easy to understand operation manuals,fully plays its role by helping organizations to adapt quickly and accurately to the situation where working operation have to be performed for the first time or require sudden transformation in response to a sudden environmental change such as the current state of emergency. Besides, it is effective not only for new employees but also for employees who work for the first time in a while. The easy-to-understand visual-based procedure manual has become a strong ally.

The same procedure manual can be viewed differently depending on the purpose