Think about your last team meeting.
Did it involve a person standing in front of the room presenting concepts to the entire group? Were you unable to contribute to the conversation? If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
A majority of U.S. employees are not engaged in the workplace. According to a 2014 Gallup poll,only 31.5% of workers were engaged in their jobs.
Companies have taken note and are seeking a more collaborative approach with employees.
Collaboration is nothing new. The Merriam- Webster Dictionary defines it as the ability “to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something.” In other words: teamwork. In the business world, collaboration not only equals a happier workforce, it represents an educated one. This is because it naturally inspires a sense of belonging within an organization, meaning that employees feel almost part of a family. Collaboration allows workers to share best practices and better understand company objectives, guidelines and resources.
The key to success is having employees well trained and current in today’s versatile business environment. That involves incorporating interactive training practices to engage and spark a worker’s interest in learning new skills. The company, meanwhile, has a better grasp on what initiatives are understood and how they can improve their teaching model. Apart from being cost-effective, active learning is a means for a company to show its employees they are worth investing in.
When employees are involved, the chances they retain the information presented to them is at its highest.
3 Strategies for a More Collaborative Workplace:
Communicate
Share ideas with anyone who will listen. When you challenge yourself to communicate a thought, it forces you to clarify your thinking in order for another person to understand. By opening up an idea for critique, you’ll receive additional ideas from the person whom you shared it with.
Visualize
Illustrate where you want your idea to go. This can be accomplished by using visuals to communicate and clarify your idea at the most simplistic level. Visuals are a great facilitator to aid strategic thinking and planning, and six times more effective than words alone.
Acknowledge
It’s important to give credit when your collaborator contributes a good idea, hard work or even good constructive criticism. Collaboration works best when team members feel appreciated and valued. Each participant is part of the team for a reason as they are competent in their specialty.
Turning Technologies, an e-learning company that believes in the pedagogical benefits of interactive response technology, manufactures a portfolio of industry leading hardware and software solutions developed to enhance learning at all levels.
They create easy-to-use solutions that enable you to ask questions and gather feedback in real-time while providing valuable data to monitor and measure learning progress, as engaging and assessing is the key.
These solutions provide endless ways to engage. Create collaborative, interactive learning environments. Leverage the instructional material and easily create new questions or use existing content. They can deliver real-time or self-paced assessments, surveys or questions to obtain learner feedback.
At the same time, they facilitate multiple levels of assessment to identify understanding in the moment or overtime, they receive data at the point of instruction for personalized learning and remediation and collect data-driven insight, manage and customize reporting views for meaningful analysis.
Hence you can leverage on tools such ExamView, that within minutes, can allow you to create customized assignments and tests by using robust authoring tools to manage content. OrTurningPoint, that incorporates interactive questions within PowerPoint presentations or poll your learners over top of any application. And lastly, Response Options, use web-based apps or browsers and hardware devices to support every learner in all environments.
The Company demonstrates, through a number of case studies, how audience response systems (ARS) in particular provide valuable support and enhance learning development during every step of the training process.
This is the case of Sherwin-Williams, a General Building Materials Company that each year hosts a national sales conference for nearly 1,900 members of its Sales Excellence team.
Challenge:
To host a successful meeting of that size is a vast undertaking, and to incorporate a new structure is even more of an obstacle. Chuck Mengel, Training Manager for Sales Excellence, wanted to increase employee engagement and retention of material, all while delivering a consistent training overview of the company’s Seven Step Sales Process.
Solution:
Audience response technology integrated with PowerPoint was used to create a collaborative learning environment and measure training effectiveness. The platform allowed Mengel and his trainers to collect audience feedback in real-time and gauge learner understanding through engaging presentations. At the national sales conference, the Sherwin- Williams’ Sales Excellence team had the opportunity to participate in cooperative learning activities and voice feedback to the trainers on the information presented. The tools presented a unique opportunity to incorporate live, quiz-based training sessions on the Seven Step Sales Process. Teams were created from geographic sales areas to encourage participation through friendly competition.
Results:
Through the use of audience response technology (ARS), the sales team greatly benefited from participation in a social learning process. Mengel was provided with a means to quantify learning development made by the geographic sales areas as well as a mechanism for the trainers to measure their overall effectiveness. “The final feedback was upbeat, and people were excited about what interactive polling could accomplish in a short span of time,” stated Mengel. Audience response systems are a mainstay with Sherwin Williams as the company has utilized the technology more than a dozen times, and there are no plans for slowing down its use