The international home appliance brand Bosch approached us to help them update the way they deliver their employee inductions. Until recently, they, like many other organisations, carried out their on boarding training in the traditional way – in a classroom to a room full of people. However, they could see the value in transitioning their training to digital learning material using Skype for Business, although they were concerned that the new digital training wouldn’t be able to re-create the level of engagement their traditional 1-day course had been able to generate.
This is what we did to solve that problem for Bosch...
The main challenge we faced was finding ways to keep the attention of the participants during the webinar by keeping the content interesting. The existing PowerPoint slides included lots of small text which didn’t translate to online learning – the amount of words on screen would have caused the participants to disengage with the training. Fearing that people would switch off and start looking at their mobile phones instead, we updated the wordy slides to feature eye-catching graphics with less text.
With traditional face-to-face training, there’s usually a presenter stood in front of the group to focus on, but with a webinar you only have the voice of the presenter talking and PowerPoint slides themselves. So, we made sure that they included lots of graphics, bright colours and the slides were constantly changing. This strategy helped to maintain the attention of the user while also managing to get across the important messages.
We also made the webinar as interactive as possible and embraced the annotation function in Skype for Business to create a quiz where the participants can click on an answer to reveal the question. This activity, along with others and videos, made the content engaging throughout.
Over the years Bosch had developed a strong face-to-face induction for their new employees with some nice tasks that were difficult to transfer to a webinar. One of these was where a new employee found out three facts about each of the other participants and then shared them with the group. We liked this icebreaker and didn’t want to lose it, so we put together an offline pre-pack that included a section for the participants to prepare their own introductions.
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“We used our new webinar in March 2020 and the interactive induction went down really well with our new starters! Thank you for your innovative ideas and suggestions, First Media!”
Amelie Bestek | Human Resources Development
Bosch UK
If you’d like to speak to us about how we might be able to help you with your next project, call us on 01507 607783.
