Tuesday Insight: A Pat on the Team’s Back

I hope you don’t mind, but rather than my normal ramblings, I thought I’d take the opportunity this week to reflect on what we’ve been doing over the last three or four months to support trainers during these strange times. I wanted to do this to let you know about initiatives you might have missed and also to say a public thank you to my amazing and slightly reduced team who have been working so hard.

Four months ago, or is it five now, we’d never heard of Zoom. And I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of the idea of remote delivery of training. But what is it they say about necessity and change? 

We were forced outside of our own comfort zones and as a consequence we’ve learned new skills and become converts to remote delivery. We first practised within the team (our remote training sessions are now a regular part of the week) and built an understanding of how we could make remote training interactive, engaging and fun.

Then, for three months we ran free demonstration sessions once or twice a week to help equip our customers with the skills they need to be able to deliver training virtually. And we learnt more from those sessions too. 

To remotely deliver training that is engaging you need the right tools, and that includes the right materials. 

We’ve already converted modules covering more than 25 different topics to remote delivery modules, and we’re adding more every week.

At the same time, we’ve added a brand new series of activities on Remote Teams and Remote Team Management; which suddenly became much hotter topics than before!

Amongst our converted modules is our first team building game conversion. Island of Opportunity is one of my all-time favourite activities, and now it works just as well even if your participants are in different locations.

Having run our first virtual Discovery Day as far back as April, these are set to become an ongoing part of the support we provide trainers in the future. They’re a great opportunity to ‘meet’ other trainers, learn new skills, and network. And one of the joys for us, has been meeting customers as far away as Australia, India, Germany, Luxembourg and South Africa.  

We’ve got some lovely little additions coming soon. I know that a lot of our customers love The Witches of Glum and Land of the Nutritos, so you’ll be happy to hear that as part of our remote delivery work, we’ve commissioned professional recordings of these stories, which we hope to add to the library in the coming days.

And, using our experience creating e-learning content for Managers’ Library, we’re adding mini activities, such a drag and drop, to our remote delivery modules too. Often, these will be completed by teams working in breakout rooms as in the case of The Leadership Identikit.

There’s a huge amount more to do of course. If you’ve got a favourite module in Trainers’ Library that you’d like converted for remote delivery, let us know and we’ll take a look and prioritise it if we can.

In the meantime, thank you to our customers, of course, and thank you especially to my colleagues. Like people in other organisations up and down the country, they’ve really risen to the challenge of the last few months and without their loyalty, support and commitment, we could never have achieved so much in such a short space of time. 

Until next time…

p.s,. Oh, and we launched a new business too, to promote writing skills, and creative writing skills in particular, and support world literacy.