Benefits of Mobile Workforce Management for Onsite Training
Onsite training organizations often have many workers traveling to client companies to provide training on new systems, new processes, or other types of professional development. Many of these trainers are contract based or part-time and never actually step foot in the headquarters or main offices of the companies that they are serving.
For the client receiving training, having an onsite trainer come to their office is often preferred because it’s more convenient, flexible, and cost-effective than sending their employees offsite. But with so much coordination involved for both the trainers and the trainees, onsite training can get complicated. This is where a Mobile Workforce Management solution can provide operational efficiencies for organizations sending their trainers all over.
Mobile workforce management solutions give onsite training organizations an easier and more efficient way to manage their training programs, collect relevant data, and relay it from the field to the office, all while allowing trainees to learn new skills in the convenience of their worksite.
Get Smarter About How You Train
Here are three excellent reasons companies that sell training as a service or as part of their product offering should use mobile workforce management to support their training programs.
Streamlined Communication for Better Prepared Trainers
An effective mobile workforce management platform includes features that streamline communication between trainers and the main office, as well as with the client companies where the training will occur. Text notifications make it easy for trainers to provide updates to the office, and vice versa, as well as request additional information about or troubleshoot issues related to their sessions.
Additionally, a mobile workforce management platform should provide the trainer with detailed information about the training session, such as client expectations and outcomes. This information should detail who the intended trainees are, what type of training is required, the duration of the training, and whether specific training materials are required to bring onsite or provide in advance to the trainees. Not only does this set the trainer up for success, but this helps to ensure that the time spent in training is maximized by equipping the trainees with the necessary information and expectations prior to the actual session.
Simplified Administration and Greater Business Insight
Onsite training has many moving parts, from scheduling sessions to booking meeting space and communicating the date, time, and location of training to everyone involved. In addition, collecting trustworthy data from your onsite trainers can be time-consuming and challenging, slowing down your finance and operations teams from making important business decisions based on training outcomes.
Mobile workforce management software can automate these scheduling and notification tasks to decrease administrative work and improve efficiency, instead of manually updating information and sharing it with individual teams. The right solution can also provide a platform for trainers to collect notes and information from their training sessions that automatically syncs via the cloud back to the main office.
The mobile workforce management platform proactively sends reminders to trainees of where and when the training is scheduled, so they have plenty of time to prepare for their training and manage their workloads in advance. This also ensures that training sessions are not missed and that the trainer’s time is optimized from preparation to execution.
Additionally, within the system, an instructor can view all of their scheduled sessions for that day or week, and receive real-time notifications of any cancellations or scheduling changes. This visibility into the trainer’s schedule further helps provide visibility for the main office into resource utilization and can help them make sure that they are not over or underutilizing their trainers. This insight can also help your business determine if you need to invest in further hiring or if you can improve your operational efficiencies by utilizing your existing resources better.
Optimized Travel and Reduced Business Costs
Traveling between sites can consume a considerable amount of an onsite trainer’s time, in addition to incurring travel costs from non-optimized travel routes. Mobile workforce management tools offer the ability to “smart schedule” and find the fastest routes between training sites, giving trainers more time with trainees and maximizing caseloads.
For example, instead of asking a trainer to zig-zag back and forth across town for various onsite trainings, sessions could be scheduled in order of proximity to each other. And if a training appointment is canceled, the system can easily match the trainer with a different last-minute appointment to reduce downtime and optimize the trainers’ schedules.
Loss of employee productivity is typically one of the highest costs associated with training. Companies report spending an average of 34 hours per year per employee on training alone. That’s a considerable amount of time that a worker isn’t billing to customers or turning prospects into clients, so it is even more critical that training time and costs are used efficiently.
Onsite training paired with mobile workforce management can reduce the time spent training employees, therefore increasing efficiency. For example, say 10 employees need training on a new piece of technology, and the offsite training location is 15 minutes away. This adds up quickly to 5 hours’ worth of round-trip travel the company will pay for, in addition to lost productivity over that time span. Now, imagine how the cost increases if 50 employees need to be trained, or if the training location is a little further away. With onsite training, the company outsources that travel cost to the trainer, whose travel schedule is much more efficient, thanks to mobile workforce management.
Use Cases: Onsite Training With Mobile Workforce Management
Organizations have turned to mobile workforce management tools to address their unique, complex, onsite training needs. Here are two examples of how mobile workforce management helps onsite providers manage the complexity of scheduling training for their employees and clients.
Health Safety Onsite Training
The American Red Cross a leading provider of health, safety, and disaster preparedness training has 1,250 mobile trainers who deliver 60,000 courses annually. Before implementing mobile workforce management, schedulers manually tracked the number of hours assigned to each instructor and only knew after the fact whether they had booked each instructor to full capacity.
This was an inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive means of operation that was hindering the continued growth of this organization. Since implementing a mobile workforce management tool, the organization has reduced scheduling time for its health and safety classroom training by 43%, reduced underutilization of instructors by 31%, and decreased scheduling costs by 30%.
Education Software Onsite Training
For Achieve3000, a leader in improving literacy competency through their differentiated literacy instruction program for pre-kindergarten through adult learners, the challenge was a home-grown scheduling system. The system required significant data entry and manual updating but often did not provide trainers with adequate information to do their jobs.
They needed to find a better solution for their trainers in the field that offered more automation and would easily integrate with other solutions the business relied on in their finance and operations departments.
With a mobile workforce management platform in place, schedulers can now easily see the status of mobile trainers in real-time, as well as easily reassign or allocate additional trainers to jobs as session needs change. Additionally, they can assign their trainers based on location data, time zones, and job requirements like certification and training types. In turn, trainers now have real-time schedule updates and session details at their fingertips with the mobile app, which also gives them the ability to fill in their service records while onsite.
Empowering Onsite Training With Mobile Workforce Management
Optimizing scheduling, administrative needs, communication, and other nuances that come with onsite training are becoming increasingly critical for organizations. Mobile workforce management software can powerfully address many of the issues that onsite trainers face. Not only do you better engage your trainers by optimizing their availability, but you also ensure that your business is getting the full value that your contract and part-time trainers offer to your business.
With Skedulo, managing a mobile training workforce is a breeze, with real-time schedules, streamlined communication, efficient travel logistics, accurate data collection, and so much more. Book a Skedulo demo today!
