One of the scariest things about working remotely or learning remotely is that you’re more of your own boss. With no one glancing over at you or engaging with you face to face there are more of those moments when you think to yourself, “what will I do now, then?”
The bigger question is what do you expect to achieve by the end of the week!? There are a couple tools that I use and here are some of the tips that I use to stay on track each week.
OUR MYOB TRAINING COURSE is basically an induction into the role of a bookkeeper, in that it provides students with an overview of the duties typically carried out by a bookkeeper. Most of our students take our MYOB training course because they both want, and need, to know how to use the software in order to find work as a bookkeeper.
In the world of business training and coaching, this is called the Will versus Skill Matrix. Employees who have both the will to succeed and the skill to succeed are highly desirable in the workplace.
Transparency, will and skill
Employees who have only one of those attributes, however, are less desirable. Helping staff maintain both the will and the skill to succeed in their jobs has a lot to do with how transparent you are as an organisation.
We’ve mentioned transparency in business before, notably in relation to induction training programs. Induction training programs are a highly efficient way to communicate easily and efficiently with your staff, while also testing their will and skill to succeed at their jobs.
While most induction training programs are used to merely address the requirements of the Work Health and Safety Act, or to induct contractors and consultants to a business’ premises, induction training programs can also be used to further your employees’ professional development.
Help your staff upskill with a Word or Excel course
Furthering your employees’ professional development can be done by providing your staff with online training courses that are relevant and useful to their jobs, such as a Word or Excel training course. You’ll be surprised how many tasks can be done with these software applications — and therefore how empowering this knowledge becomes!
Online delivery of this content allows your staff to complete the course at their own pace, in an informal environment — at home or at their desk at work, rather than in a dedicated training centre on a dedicated day — and it also allows you to monitor their progress.
Being able to see how your employees are getting on with the training courses can illuminate areas where your staff could benefit from further training; it can also highlight those staff member who possess the will and the skill to succeed.
Those staff members who are have both the will and the skill to succeed in their jobs also happen to be highly engaged, and as we mentioned in a previous post, more productive.
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If you’re looking for ways to keep your staff highly engaged with your business, we can help you tailor and deliver highly engaging induction training courses to your staff. Visit our website for more information, or contact us today for a quote.
Our PowerPoint online training courses will show you how to create your own persuasive and compelling PowerPoint presentations. In this PowerPoint case study, we’re going to show you what our partner, EzyAccess, included in their sales presentations. These sales presentations were then shown to chief executive and senior managers at some of Australia’s largest hospitals.
Explaining “The Problem”
Hospitals are busy places that have lots of people coming and going every day, and a very ad-hoc way to manage them. In most cases, few hospitals policed their visitor and contractor management policies, which exposed them to many risks.
Explaining “The Risk”
Almost anyone could walk into a hospital and have access to its most sensitive areas — operating rooms, for example.
Likewise, contractors hired to perform work could subcontract it out to a person or entity unknown to the hospital and unqualified to perform that work. If that subcontractor or someone else — a patient, say — was injured, the hospital would held responsible.
Explaining “The Solution”
EzyAccess provided a cloud-based safety and compliance system that businesses could use to track visitors and contractors who were visiting their premises. It enabled businesses to stay compliant with Australia’s WHS laws, and to also ensure each person was familiar with the business’s own process and procedures to eliminate the business’s liability if someone was injured.
Chief executive-level presentations
Directors and chief executives are primarily interested in increasing their business’s efficiency and reducing financial risk to the company.
EzyAccess’s chief executive-level presentations explained how the EzyAccess safety and compliance system helped hospitals stay compliant with Australia’s WHS laws, kept their hospitals safe from unknown, unqualified entities, increased employee efficiency and reduced the financial risk of litigation.
Senior manager-level presentations
Unlike chief executives, who could be held personally liable if the business was found in breach of Australia’s WHS laws, senior managers were concerned with how implementing a new system would help (or potentially, impede) their direct reports.
Every business is resistant to change, particularly the implementation of new technologies that could require more time and effort on the part of their staff than the previous system. If this were to occur, there’s the additional risk that adoption would be slow.
The EzyAccess presentations to senior managers explained the adoption strategy in full, and how the system improved staff efficiency by eliminating the need to contact contractors about compliance documents.
Tailor presentations to stakeholders
Just as it’s important to target your ideal customer with your PowerPoint presentations, it’s also important that you target particular stakeholders within a business to ensure they see the value your product or service brings them.
It’s no use focusing an entire presentation to a chief executive on how easy the system is to use — this will certainly be a consideration for any chief executive, yes, but it won’t be the primary one. Just as it’s no good telling the staff on the frontline — the employees actually using the system — how much money and potential litigation it’ll save the company.
Our PowerPoint training courses will teach you how to create persuasive PowerPoint presentations that you can use to target key stakeholders within a business, to help you make a sale or get hired. Alternatively, our sales training courses will show you how to identify and target your ideal customer.
At EzyLearn we are constantly refreshing the content of our online training courses. Where possible, we draw on real-life case studies as examples, to help you learn, and apply your skills, in a relevant way that makes sense. Visit our Micro Courses page to learn more.
Many businesses have started to include videos on the ‘careers’ section of their websites, which demonstrate to potential new people the culture the company values and encourages.
In the past, it’s only been larger businesses that have done this, but it’s becoming more common among smaller businesses too.
Use PowerPoint to train new people
Aside from creating a ‘culture’ video that can be used to show applicants what it’s like to work in your business, a PowerPoint presentation can also be used to train new staff in your processes and procedures once they’re employed. All of this has been proven to help staff productivity.
An on-boarding presentation created in PowerPoint can be used to deliver Work Health and Safety (WHS) training — which is mandatory for all businesses employing staff, whether they’re permanent employees or freelance contractors — induction training, and also explain how your business operates.
Modern employee training for modern times
In the past, on-boarding training — be it WHS, induction or otherwise — has been delivered in person. Sometimes a new employee would be sat in a room to watch a company video and complete a written test on their own.
Other times, companies would gather all new hires (often people who’ve been working at the company for as much as three months, by this point) and have someone from their HR department lead a day of training.
However, both these methods come with flaws because neither one shows much commitment to workplace culture, safety or operating procedures.
Train staff in-house or offsite
EzyLearn offers induction training packages for businesses keen to use our learning management system to deliver training, quizzes, short courses, etc. But you can still use PowerPoint to train staff at your premises, as well as remote workers.
Creating an on-boarding training course in PowerPoint will increase employee engagement, and also ensure each employee understands their role in the business and how it operates. Or for more help on figuring out what you need to include in an online induction, read here.
At EzyLearn we have a bit of a soft spot for PowerPoint. It’s the oft-overlooked program in Microsoft Office that is typically associated with slideshows and presentations, and often boring ones at that. But it can do so much more.
But did you know PowerPoint can also be used to create an online training induction course? Induction training is imperative for any business that hires contractors to perform work for them, either onsite or elsewhere. Induction training is necessary that any contractor or employee understands your company’s policies and procedures, whether they’re going to be working at your premises or not.
Our PowerPoint Training Course takes you through how to create your own induction training course using PowerPoint, which you can then deliver to your staff and contractors using a learning management system, or we can deliver your induction training for you.
Simple inductions that work
The end goal of an induction course should be to have all your contractors complete it, and learn something from it. You need to strike a balance between an induction that includes every last bit of information about your business, how it functions, its policies and procedures, and one that only covers the bare essentials.
Use images to illustrate risks and scenarios, as opposed to describing them. This is easy when you’re using PowerPoint to create your induction training. And remember the PowerPoint golden rule: One idea per slide.
Authenticating students
After you’ve created your induction training course in PowerPoint, it’s vital that your contractors actually complete it. This is why it’s important to authenticate each contractor or student who takes your induction training course — it also helps if you include a short quiz at the end, so you can see whether they paid attention.
There are a couple of different ways you can authenticate students to ensure the correct person is taking the induction course (and not their mum or friend or partner, for example). We talk about the different authentication methods you can use on our website, but keep in mind that only inductions delivered to students via a learning management system can authenticate students.
Microsoft PowerPoint decks (yes, that is the word they use in the corporate world) enable you to get your knowledge, thoughts and ideas across to other people. Whether you’re showing off a new creation to one person, presenting a total solution to a small group of potential clients or teaching an entire audience, Microsoft PowerPoint forces you to put the information in a logical order.
Some people think PowerPoint presentations are the most boring way to present information, but the key is to not rely on the slides for telling the story, rather using PowerPoint slides as an aid and selling your pitch using your words, gestures and other props.
Older PowerPoint versions are included in all of our courses
When you enrol into any course with EzyLearn you get access to ALL versions and ALL levels. That means that when we have a new version of the course go live (like we have in this announcement for PowerPoint version 2016!) existing students can access the course materials for no extra cost. New students also get to view and access all older training course resources too.
The latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint lets collaborators see what other collaborators are doing. If you are familiar with Google Docs you’ll know about this feature already – because it’s almost freaky to see exactly what someone else is working on and where in the document they are. The only drawback is that you’ll need to be using OneDrive or Office 365 SharePoint. OneDrive is Microsoft’s equivalent to Dropbox and Google Drive and most people I know are already using a file sharing system already, but like all software companies try to do they’re no doubt doing everything they can to get PowerPoint users onto OneDrive.
EzyLearn Microsoft PowerPoint Course with version 2016
The main reason for this blog post is to announce that our Microsoft PowerPoint course is now being loaded with the latest versions of the software training videos and workbooks!
2016 versions are coming to Excel and Microsoft Word Courses shortly
If you’re an existing student you’ll be thrilled to hear that we’ve completed the production of all training videos and training workbooks for Microsoft Word and they’ll be implemented into our Learning Management System shortly too! Microsoft Excel 2016 will then be created so our students will be able to access Microsoft Excel Beginners to Advanced training material on every version from 2000 until 2016!
Online Inductions cover the risks, share the expectations and educate new people
We’ve had growing interest in our online induction services and there are some things that are good to know about putting an induction into an online course format. The key benefits are that they are consistent for all staff or contractors who do it, they can do the induction from anywhere and in their own time and you’ll have evidence that they have completed it! That includes them agreeing to your policies and procedures.
Online Inductions can help with WH&S and policy risks
As an employer or a site administrator you are responsible to demonstrate due diligence in explaining any potential risks at your site and making sure any workers or contractors acknowledge those risks and that you have explained them. A test is usually the end task in an online and the certificate issued at the end of the successful completion of that test is one form of evidence that due diligence has been carried out.
Expectations are covered in Policy and Procedures in your online induction
Policies around parking and the treatment of other people as well as how you leave a workplace are the common areas of concern for most businesses but you can put anything you want in a policy document and because it’s your site, workers need to read and agree to your policies and procedures to work there.
Teach your staff and contractors
If there are aspects about your business that are important you can teach anyone who arrives to do work before they arrive. If they need to have a certain skill or they need to know about how something at your site works you can teach them. You can even give them training about your products, how to use Microsoft Excel or anything else you can think of.
If you want a quote to see how easy it is to get an online induction up and running for your business tell us what you want and we’ll see how we can help.
Training is something that I have been involved with since the mid 1990’s – sure, I don’t look that old, but it’s true – and we’ve used all sorts of tools to create our training courses, including:
Creating educational videos using Camtasia,
Creating some courses using PowerPoint presentations
Hosting the videos online using Wistia,
Writing training workbooks using Microsoft Word
Creating our website(s) using WordPress
Promoting our courses using Google
Deliver and managing the online training courses and students using Moodle
I spent a lot of time recently speaking with councils, city building managers, schools, aged care facilities and hospitals and have noticed a massive demand for inductions. These organisations want to rapidly induct their staff but more importantly their contractors about how things operate at their facilities. If you read my previous post about rapid induction you’ll know what I mean.
Staff Inductions
We use our own internal inductions to get new staff members up to speed quickly in how our business works, what we expect from them in customer service and most importantly how we offer, sell and support our online training courses so it makes sense to have a training program for existing staff. The most apparent need however is for contractors who come and work at your site and may never have been their before – for these contractors the biggest reason for having a contractor induction is to educate the contractors of any know risks at the site – like asbestos.
Contractor Inductions
Contractors who come to sites like hospitals, councils, schools, aged care facilities, city buildings perform their work on complex equipment that could affect the safety of other people in the building. They need to be qualified to do the work they do and they need to have insurances to cover any potential incidents or accidents and WorkCover for their people. These aspects of a contractors work is often referred to as Contractor Management and when this term is used there is often confusion as to whether you are talking about the company or individual people who work for the company.
Many sites have a manual contractor management system which means they dedicate a certain time each week or month to go through files within folders for each supplier to make sure all of their contractors “credentials are up to date” – can you imagine doing this all of the time?! We have a system that automates this process by reminding them of when their credentials are due to expire and need updating, but I digress.
Create Your Own Contractor Inductions using PowerPoint
Contractor inductions are so popular these days because they are a sure fire way for site managers to demonstrate that they have informed the contractors about any potential risks at their sites – and that can save their bacon! Did you know that someone referred to as a PCBU (in WH&S law Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking), is personally responsible and liable if they neglect in their duty of care for safety at their site!
That is why it is important for everyone to have a contractor induction course. It’s also great that these courses can be initally created using software found in almost every office – PowerPoint. It’s up to you then how you want your induction to look to students, plain and simple slides or audio visual presentations.
[quote]Make sure you contact us to see how quick and easy it is to create your own contractor induction training courses and manage your own enrolments.[/quote]
Start Your Own Business Creating Online Induction Courses
If you like the thought of getting to know how to do this you should come and check out our Online Induction Business Opportunities page at the Startup Academy. My team will show you how to complete the whole process of creating a training course, starting with the creation of a simple powerpoint presentation. At the end you’ll have an online training course with test and completion certificates – just what every site needs for their contractor inductions.
Then if you want to build a business based on your new found skills you can work with us to find new clients and start living the dream of working from home helping local business with their safety training. Click on the StartUp Academy image and follow the links and you can even complete the first stage of the course for free.
I’ve written in the past about how our MYOB courses help students get inducted into the role of a bookkeeper because they take them through the steps a bookkeeper goes through in the daily operations of a small business. I’ve also written about the various other benefits of having an induction course:
I am writing today to let you know that we are in the final stages of completing a course that teaches you how to create an online induction course! We have been creating online courses for over a decade and have gone through the course creation process hundreds of times and we realise that many companies need to create their own induction courses.
Rapid Induction for New Staff
Just the other week I was speaking with a successful small business bookkeeper who asked me about the best way to get his new staff up to speed. After a long conversation it dawned on me that this person needs a system to educate his new staff about his business. He needs an induction course for new staff to get them up to speed rapidly and if he created this course as an online course he could save hundreds of hours in person-time over the course of each year.
I explained that he would just need to convert any written document into a presentation using Powerpoint, record audio over it as a video presentation and then come up with some test questions and…. then I realised that most people aren’t as familiar with this stuff as we are.
Create an Online Induction Course
If you are interested in creating an online induction course to enable rapid induction of your staff, contractors, even customers then stay tuned as the launch date of our course is imminent. If you would like to learn but at this stage just want one created for you then learn more about our online induction course creation service.
Company morale is important for any company, because it helps foster engagement between your staff and their work. If your business has a team of highly engaged staff members, they’re likely to be more productive and ultimately that’s good news for you as the business owner.
Keeping your staff engaged with their work and your business isn’t as hard – or as expensive as it seems. While money certainly plays a huge role in how satisfied employees are in their jobs, it’s not the be all and end all – just look at companies like Google, which have a highly engaged workforce, but which also allows their staff to bring their pets to work with them and includes an onsite games room. Your staff spend more time at work than they do at home – so they want to feel happy and appreciated while they’re there, otherwise they’ll go elsewhere.
‘Talk’ to Your People
But you don’t need to institute a ‘bring your pet to work day’ (although you could if you wanted), nor do you need to set up a pool table in the lunch room, because employee morale and engagement starts by opening the lines of communication. If your organisation has a policy of transparency, and routinely communicates new policies and procedures with their staff, they’re more likely to trust you and feel that as an organisation you trust them in return with company information.
Induction — A Great Way to Open Up the Lines of Communication
An induction training program, which is used both for new employees, contractors, consultants and existing employees is the easiest and most efficient way to demonstrate that transparency to your staff. And online induction training programs make it easy to deliver this information to your staff, while also making it easy to keep the information up to date.
Whether it’s a new procedure relating to work health and safety, or a new way of sending in invoices, you can create the content and deliver it to your staff with ease. Best of all, you can monitor and track which staff have completed their training and which staff haven’t, allowing you to follow up with them. This helps you ensure your due diligence as an organisation, and helps to boost that all-important staff morale.
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For more information on online induction training programs, visit our website or contact us for a free quote today.
Did you know that when the first supermarkets arrived in Australia, supermarket promoters hired instructors to provide induction training to adults and children demonstrating how to push shopping trolleys down the aisles.
How Did People Shop Before the Supermarket?
Until the supermarket, Australians had been accustomed to queuing at a counter and presenting a shopping list to their green grocer or their butcher, who would then select the items on the list on the shopper’s behalf.
Those first supermarkets offered what I would call ‘bomb shelter supplies’; the kind of non-perishable foods (canned goods, condensed milk, etc.) that you’d stock your bomb shelter with in case the sky fell – or the H-bomb did, at least.
Their Own Network of Suppliers
Today, supermarkets offer so much more than that. The limited fresh produce they once supplied has been expanded to a full range of fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat and poultry supplied directly to them via their own network of farmers and suppliers – an entirely unsurprising direction for the Wesfarmers-owned Coles to take.
Over the years, Coles and Woolies have also entered the petrol market by entering into agreements Shell and Caltex respectively; more recently they’ve even entered into the financial game, offering credit cards and insurance.
Like it or not, our supermarkets are the early adopters of new social trends and they’re shaping our entire shopping experience as a result.
The Evolution of Telecommunications
Now that we’re living in an age of smart phones and high-speed internet, the telecommunications industry has been turned upside down. Whereas you previously only had a small number of telcos to choose from and a limited range of services, these new technologies and methods of communication are forcing traditional telcos like Telstra to take notice.
Skype
Take Skype as an example. There was a time not so long ago when if you wanted to make an international call it would cost a bomb. Then Skype came along. Now you can make free international calls using your broadband connection and at the same time see the person at the other end.
iMessage
Apple did the same by introducing the iMessage function on their iPhones, which allows iPhone users to text each other for free, using their mobile data.
VoIP
These technological advancements have seen the share prices of voice-over IP (VoIP) companies go through the roof, which Ken Maswell of Virion, a small bespoke VoIP provider in Sydney can attest to.
According to Maswell, the share prices of VoIP company, myfonenet, have increased by 57 percent since May last year. “When it comes to telecommunications, customers are now exercising their choice in what was previously considered the dark arts of telephony,” he said.
Coles and Woolies have long offered handsets and prepaid mobile sims; even more recently, Aldi entered the mobile space as authorised resellers of Telstra prepaid mobile sims and handsets at highly competitive prices.
But there’s plenty of demand for a Coles or Woolies-brand mobile service – ideally one offering greater data usage given most people use their mobile phones to send and receive emails, watch videos, communicate via social media, and so on.
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What do you think? Do you think Coles and Woolies will soon become telcos as well? How do you think they would fare pitted against the like of Virgin and Vodafone who have each been in the game quite a while now?
Now that you’ve created your training content and it’s ready to be uploaded onto our learning management system, you need to create a way for people to enrol in your training course, which is accessible from a website.
How to Enrol People in Your Training Course
The easiest way to enrol your staff is to create an online enrolment form that either links to our learning management system where the person is automatically enrolled, or a more basic enrolment form that requires someone to manually enter the person’s details into our learning management system. The option you choose is largely dependent on the size of your organisation.
There are plenty of web-based form builders available that you can use to create your enrolment form, each varying in features and flexibility. If you’re looking for something that’s free, the Google Apps marketplace offers some fairly basic form-building software; there’s also Wufoo, which counts micro-blogging site, Twitter as one of its clients (along with us at EzyLearn!); if you’re looking for optimum flexibility, however, try Formsite.
Once you’ve created an enrolment form, you can use that same form-building software to create the exam your staff will need to complete in order to pass their induction training. It’s best to use a multiple-choice format for your exam, and try to keep the questions as simple as possible — in a real-world scenario, a person will need to respond to a potential safety risk quickly, so you want them to be as prepared as possible.
Have People Had the Requisite Training? Why You Need a Credentialing System
If your organisation has a lot of contractors coming and going on a daily basis, it may be necessary to have a credentialing system on your site. A credentialing system requires visitors to sign in upon arrival at your site to verify whether they’ve had the necessary WHS training.
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EzyLearn has recently partnered with EzyAccess to provide a suite of options in the area of WHS training. This means that we can provide businesses with the means to induct and train their own staff and also verify and credential visitors to their site.
For more information on how EzyLearn can help your business with your WHS needs, contact us.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…