Available Options for ensuring staff receive relevant training
SharePoint is a fantastic repository for content. It so much better than what we had years ago where everything was stored on the file-system in a layer of folders, or in countless other systems. SharePoint has given an organization the ability to store (or surface) that content all from one familiar place. Once it’s in SharePoint there are plenty of ways to manage and enhance that data (tagging, search, sorting, filtering, security, views, versioning, workflows, and so on).
It’s now much better, but there are still challenges…
Although the situation has improved beyond recognition, there is still a down side to SharePoint’s success. If an organization has millions of content items, generated by countless teams and departments, it’s still amazingly difficult to get the right content into the the right peoples hands.
Lets imagine a scenario…
Imagine you are the Health and Safety Manager in a large construction firm. Your construction staff work all around the world on projects that last months. Over recent months there have been several instances of employees and contractors injuring themselves by lifting heavy equipment in the wrong way. Most of the incidents were avoidable if some basic training had been given.
Your job is to get the staff trained so these injuries can be avoided.
What are your options ?
1. Employ a team of specialized trainers to visit and train individuals and teams on site.
Verdict : Great way of training, but time-consuming and costly.
2. You write a short training paper outlining the correct lifting procedure. You then email this to all staff and contractors.
Verdict : How do you get the correct message across in written and drawn form? Diagrams aren’t as good as a working example. In addition to this, how do you know if the staff read and understood it? How do you track who received the e-mail and who was away? What about new staff joining a project, how do they get trained?
3. You create a video and embed it into a SharePoint web page.
Verdict : Video is a far better way of communicating the procedure and SharePoint is flexible enough to host many types of video in many different ways. This still leaves the problem of how do you communicate the availability of the video and track who has watched it?
4. You create a video, embed it into a SharePoint web page, then distribute and track it with DocRead for SharePoint.
Verdict : Your fabulous video is assigned to the relevant people and DocRead allows you to monitor who has and hasn’t watched it. This solution gives a low cost, effective way to get the message out there and allows you to target and track who has watched the training.
How is it done?
This can easily be achieved in two stages :
- Create a web page in SharePoint containing the video.
- Distribute the web page to staff using DocRead.